The Affective Effect on Political Judgment: Comparing the Influences of Candidate Attributes and Issue Congruence

Recent scholarly attention has taken note of the fact that humans are fundamentally emotional in democratic practice.1 Even though voters may be educated and informed and may intentionally endeavor to be rational, their political judgment still can be clouded with subjective feelings and personal penchants. It is common for individuals to attach affective information to candidates;2 moreover, the most readily accessible information voters have is their own emotional responses to political figures. Given this, the attributes of political candidates can be a decisive factor in determining votes.3 People can get a glimpse of a candidate and immediately form crucial, affective opinions. Sometimes their judgments rely exclusively on mediated images or advice from others without careful study of the candidate's issues and platforms. It is, therefore, not surprising that seasoned political consultants advise public office-seekers to be cautious about their appearance and demeanor.4Of course, images of public office-seekers are not the only thing covered in the media. Lengthy, detailed discussions about important issues also are fodder for the current 24/7 media system. The stances political candidates take (or do not take) toward key issues, particularly the thorny ones, are unquestionably newsworthy. But it is challenging to gauge the extent to which issues-and which of the key issues-actually determine whether and how people cast their votes. Furthermore, it is unclear which of the two forces-attributes or issue stance-has a stronger impact when people make a decision at the ballot box. This study seeks answers to these questions using an experiment with three levels of affect for the same candidate. The affective manipulation is operationalized by positive, negative, and neutral nonverbal behaviors of a professional actor playing a congressional office-seeker in televised news interviews. Three issues- the environment, economy, and crime-were addressed in different episodes of the interviews recorded in a TV studio. The results of this experiment shed light on political communication theories of second-level agenda setting5 and the affect effect,6 and they expand our knowledge about how individuals process political information.Literature ReviewAgenda SettingThe theory that speaks most directly to our question of whether attributes or issues play a stronger role in people's political decision-making is agenda setting. The first level of the theory focuses on the impact of issue salience, and the second level hones in on affective impressions, such as the kind provided by candidates' appearance attributes. Since McCombs and Shaw's seminal piece on the agenda-setting effect,7 hundreds of studies have documented the impact of salient media coverage on the public's perceived importance of issues8 and attributes of issues.9 Both levels have been shown to be effective in predicting people's perceptions.10 However, no research has explored the influence from these competing sources in a controlled experimental setting; consequently, direct evidence of causality is absent. That is the first aim of this study, to determine whether issues (first level) or attributes (second level) have a greater influence.In these studies, many different terms are used to refer to the same or similar concepts, including the terms image, attributes, affect, affective traits, and various combinations of these words. In the interest of clarity, this study uses the term attribute or appearance attribute to refer to the concept of the image or impression a candidate conveys to voters by way of his or her positive, negative, and neutral nonverbal behaviors, including expressions, gestures, and tone of voice.PrimingThe agenda-setting effect itself does not address the question of whether the more the media cover an issue, the more the public knows about it and subsequently uses issue stance to evaluate the candidate, so we turn to priming theory. …