The Emotional Politician - An Empirical Study of Effects of Expression on Vote Intention

Abstract: Political campaign spending on marketing has been on the rise since the early 2000s. Simultaneously, campaigns are becoming increasingly focused on individual politicians rather than the parties they represent. Unfortunately, marketing research on political communication is failing to keep up, especially in terms of investigating effects of diversity among political candidates in relation to different types of non- verbal communication. This thesis addresses this gap of incompleteness in the literature by examining the impact of emotional display by politicians on attitude, identification and vote intention. A 2(male vs. female) gender x 2(majority vs. minority) ethnicity x 3(anger vs. sadness vs. happiness) emotion displayed experimental research design carried out with a nationally representative sample of the Swedish population demonstrates that both gender and ethnicity function as determinants for voters' evaluation of emotional displays. The results demonstrate that gender have a main effect on attitude and that negative emotions are superior to positive in terms of generating favorable attitudes towards and intention to vote for a politician, irrespectively of gender. It is further demonstrated that the positive effects for female politicians are amplified by an interpretive prerogative from female voters, arguably caused by in-group activation. Finally, in relation to ethnicity, it is also shown that vote intention for minority representatives are significantly lower than for majority representatives when anger is displayed; indicating that anger functions as an activating cue for xenophobic stereotypes of individuals perceived as foreign as more aggressive. This bias only holds true for male politicians.