David P. Redlawsk

For many years political scientists (and others) have championed the idea that in order to think clearly we must put aside our emotions. Who doesn’t remember, for example, parents telling us to “be rational, not emotional” in making decisions? Yet at its core, politics is about feelings. At the most basic level politics is about the allocation of scarce resources; since this means some people get things while others do not, it is not surprising that peoples’ feelings are an important part any political calculation. This is not a new idea. James Madison, after all, placed great emphasis on the need to control the inherent “passions” of a citizenry in the political arena, even going so far as devising a constitutional system explicitly designed to minimize the role of emotion. Yet, for all its obvious importance, research into the role of emotions in politics has been surprisingly lacking in recent years. Whether due to the rise of what we call “rational choice” or simply a legacy of the enlightenment’s privileging of reason over emotion, the role of emotion in politics has been understudied, despite the clear connections between how people feel about politics and how they act. New research shows that a tension exists between what is considered normatively correct and how human beings actually appear to process information. Logically, we should expect that new information about a political candidate, for example, should change our evaluation of that candidate in the direction of the new information. Yet our emotional commitments to a candidate – how we feel about him or her – come into play without our conscious awareness and may cause us to respond in ways that are anything but logical. The result may be that while we think we are carefully evaluating information and making “reasoned” decisions, our emotions may actually be in control, whether we like it or not.