The Importance of Contempt in Election Campaigns

It is well established that political campaigns generate emotional responses in voters. A set of discrete emotions -- anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm -- has been extensively studied, with each having specific effects on candidate evaluation and voting. Yet this small set does not represent the full range of emotions voters might experience. We argue that the emotion of contempt plays a unique and distinct role during campaigns. Like anger and anxiety, contempt is a negative emotion. But basic research in psychology suggests it should have distinctive effects. For example, anger is characteristically elicited by appraisals of injustice (Averill, 1982), unfair outcomes (Kuppens et al., 2003), or goal blockage (e.g., Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009). Contempt is elicited by appraisals that a person has undesirable traits like incompetence (Hutcherson & Gross, 2011) or bad character (Fischer & Roseman, 2007), or has violated community norms (Rozin et al., 1999). We make use of a module in the 2016 CCES online survey of the U.S. Presidential Election where we ask voters their perceptions of contempt in campaign communications. We examine the extent to which contempt is distinguished from anger and other emotions in predicting candidate preferences, allowing us to understand how this important but understudied emotion drives voters away from some candidates and towards others, or perhaps demobilizes them instead.