How I Vote Depends on How I Feel: The Differential Impact of Anger and Fear on Political Information Processing

Fear may be helpful when voting, two psychologists conclude:

These results suggest that fear predicts greater reliance on detailed issue-agreement information as a basis for voting decisions, whereas anger predicts greater reliance on general criteria. Our findings are consistent with research on the cognitive consequences of affect (e.g., Lerner & Tiedens, 2006; Tiedens & Linton, 2001) and with work in political science (e.g., Marcus et al., 2000). Our results advance knowledge of how affect influences the process by which voters arrive at a decision, and illustrates both the significant utility of the behavior-process methodology in the political domain and the importance of anger and fear in voters’ decision making. Our work also has practical implications for understanding elections; this is especially true for primary elections, in which important general information (e.g., party identification) typically does not differentiate candidates. Feelings of anger may promote voting for candidates who are well recognized, regardless of their beliefs on issues. However, fear may encourage individuals to vote for candidates whose positions on specific issues are congruent with their own, thus leading to more thoughtful, meaningful, and self-relevant choices.

The good news is that individual voting doesn’t matter all the much.. As economist Steven Horwitz told Free Market Mojo in an interview last year:

Most of the time, voting for a candidate is about as effective as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.  The problems are institutional, structural, and intellectual.  Voting does little, especially when the two major US parties have much more in common than differences.