Overreporting Voting: Campaign Media, Public Mood, and the Vote

dential election to examine how two possibly important affective variables—public mood and political cynicism—predict actual as compared with self-reported voting. Public mood, a construct introduced by Rahn, Kroeger, and Kite (1996) to suggest how affective processes may play a role in political behavior, is shown to have two distinct but positively correlated dimensions, one positive and one negative. After demographic variables were controlled, perceived media usefulness predicted posi-tive mood about the presidential election, which in turn predicted self-reported vot-ing. Negative campaign attitude predicted negative mood, which, in turn, influenced actual but not self-reported voting. Political cynicism, although correlated with both positive and negative public mood, predicted neither measure of voting. The bifurca-tion of influence of negative and positive public mood about elections may explain why researchers have often shown positive affect to influence voting (as measured by self-report), and why political consultants have continued to rely on negative cam-paigning and the reported increases in negative feelings it engenders in voters to influence actual votes. Keywords campaign media, public mood, self-reported voting, negative campaigns, political cynicism The decrease in voter participation over the past few decades is alarming. Voter turnout in U.S. presidential elections decreased nearly 13 % from 1960 to 1988 (Finkel & Geer, 1998, pp. 580–581; Teixeira, 1992, p. 6). Decreased voting has stirred a debate over the effects of negative political advertising on voter participation. Although some political scientists and critics of today’s political campaign techniques blame low voter partici-pation on intense negative political advertising (e.g., Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1995