It’s the emotion, stupid! Emotional responses to televised debates and their impact on voting intention

Abstract How do emotional responses to televised debates impact on voting intention? The present article addresses this question drawing on an original dataset combining survey data and real-time responses gathered in the run-up of the 2017 German federal election. The paper contributes to three major discussions in the literature of political science and psychology. First, we show that emotional responses to media stimuli are independent explanatory factors influencing post-debate voting intention while in part mediating real-time evaluations of candidate statements. Second, our analysis demonstrates that the impact of emotional responses to televised debates can barely be deemed to be structured along one single dimension of valence but that discrete emotions show distinct effects. Third, the paper supports the notion that anger and enthusiasm have an indirect impact on voting intention by increasing the weight of political predisposition and reducing the weight of evaluation of current information on candidates’ issue stances in televised debates. We also find empirical evidence for the indirect effect of anxiety as well; it reverses the pattern and reduces the weight of political conviction while increasing the importance of evaluations about candidate statements. However, the latter finding does not seem to be very robust as in fact, substitutions are also able to generate this pattern. Finally, the paper reviews implications of the findings and discusses limitations and future perspectives of research.