Emotional political advertising

Abstract

The real possibility exists that the overemphasis of a party’s image in advertisementscould lead to the neglect of important political information for voters. Emotional andnegative advertisements could therefore be detrimental to any young democracy.Against this background this article investigates the use of emotional persuasive appealsand negative messages in political newspaper advertisements in the North-West Provinceduring South Africa's general elections in 1999.The results indicate that although all the parties in the study used emotional appeals,they mostly connected them to a policy issue. However, these policy issues were notelaborated on. The opposition parties mostly used appeals of uncertainty, fear and rage.The ruling party in the province (the ANC) concentrated on appeals of hope andachievement.The ANC virtually abstained from using negative messages, while the DP, the NNP andthe FF "attacked" one another in order to emphasise their differences. They did not harmthe sustainability of the South African democracy as such, but they also did very littleto promote it actively through their media advertisements.