How prevalent and influential is anxiety as a motivating factor for political activity within the American electorate? In the last two decades, anxiety has been linked to increased information seeking, participation, and altered means of vote choice by scholars. Despite providing an impressive array of effects tied to anxiety, research generally has examined only a very small set of stimuli objects and phases of election cycles. I seek to contribute to this growing knowledge regarding the role of anxiety in the electoral environment in three ways. First, I utilize data from the 2008-9 ANES Panel Study to examine whether the individual and contextual sources of citizen anxiety vary between primary and general elections. Second, I examine whether the experience of anxiety leads to any subsequent attitudinal change during an election cycle. Third, I examine whether the experience of anxiety towards candidates is confined to distinct pockets of the voting public, particularly during the early stages of the election process. My analyses show that candidate characteristics and economic evaluations play an important role in shaping individual emotional responses to presidential primary candidates. Anxiety, however, appears capable of leading to significant attitude change only on those issues that are relatively new to political discourse and strongly tied to the candidates in question. Lastly, I find that those for whom anxiety would seem least likely to have a meaningful effect -- the strongly ideological, partisan, and politically interested -- are exactly those who are most likely to experience anxiety throughout a campaign, and especially in its early phases. This dissertation expands the discussion of electoral anxiety into the broader electoral experience in a way that speaks to the meaningful role that emotion plays in citizen behavior and decision-making in politics while acknowledging important caveats on its potential effects. While anxiety may be capable of producing meaningful changes in behavior, its expression in electoral politics appears to be a case of benefits flowing to those who are already more than capable of engaging with the political world.
Read
