The Angry Electorate - Affect and Voting Decision Making

Political scientists do not typically focus on the affect, but rather they focus exclusively on cognition. Relying on the 2012 ANES, the present study seeks to understand and analyze the importance of how a voter’s emotions specifically anger towards a political figure can effect the voter’s actions. In this paper, the factors that are essential in understanding emotions in politics are: effect of anger in comparison to other affects, distrust in media and reliance on party identification, and the role of cognition in relation to affect, the correlation between affect and cognition with voting behavior. The present research answers the question of how affect and cognition relate strongly in the direction of voting behavior in relation to partisan media. The body of research is essential in understanding how a voter’s feelings towards a candidate makes them form a specific emotional connect or disconnect for the candidate. Among the interesting findings, affect specifically anger plays an important role in candidate evaluations, in the sense that people will vote for a candidate that makes them feel a certain way