Fear and Loathing in American Elections: Context, Traits, and Negative Candidate Affect

Abstract

Affect-based models of political behavior have become increasingly complex. Not long ago, political psychology was dominated by bipolar conceptions of affect such as the familiar feeling thermometers. Such conceptions assume that movement toward one pole (e.g., positive affect) of necessity implies movement away from the other pole (e.g., negative affect). When researchers discovered that people can simultaneously experience positive and negative affect toward the same object and that these experiences had distinctive effects (Cacioppo and Berntson 1999; Cacioppo, Gardner, and Berntson 1997; Cacioppo et al. 1993; Gray 1982, 1987a, 1987b; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000), bipolar, unidimensional conceptions of affect gave way to a two-dimensional model. This model, which distinguishes between positive and negative affect, is now widely accepted in political psychology (Abelson et al. 1982; Conover and Feldman 1986; Marcus and MacKuen 1993; Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen 2000; Ottati, Steenbergen, and Riggle 1992).1 KeywordsNegative AffectCore BeliefPolitical FigureCircumplex ModelNational Election StudyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.