Anchored in the idea that political campaigns matter to electoral outcomes, The Politics of Emotions, Candidates and Choices analyzes the dynamics of emotional voting and decision-making over the course of three presidential elections between 2004 and 2012. Each presidential campaign reflects a unique tone and mood, which influences voters' perceptions of choices and candidate image. Accounting for the idiosyncratic nature of a campaign environment and a candidate's message, this analysis isolates specific emotional dimensions that were influential on voters' appraisals of specific campaign issues. Relying on the Affective Intelligence theory and the Transfer-of-Affect thesis to narrate the causal relationships between voters' emotional responses and issue appraisals, this book illustrates the specific electoral contexts when voters' emotions are trusted as political knowledge and transferred to their beliefs about certain policies.

This book examines the highly emotional context of the 2016 US presidential campaign through the scope of political theater and emotional attribution. It takes inventory of the political landscape that defined the campaign and advances the argument that the campaign's high intensity generated a more interest-attentive citizenry and became an exercise in political theater. A framework operationalizing the components of political spectacle anchors the analysis treating emotions, affect transfer and the rise of negative partisanship. The analytical scope is focused specifically on voters' emotional responses toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton and empirically demonstrates the effects of discrete feelings on five emotional dimensions including pride, hope, fear, anger, and disgust on attitudes about issues ranging from the economy to immigration to the 2016 Supreme Court vacancy. Anchored in the Affective Intelligence Theory and affect transfer, the findings lend support to the principles of negative partisanship that characterized the 2016 presidential contest.

The Hollywood Connection: The Influence of Fictional Media and Celebrity Politics on American Public Opinion is one of the first edited volumes offered in the political science discipline on the effects of fictional media and celebrity on public opinion, and synthesizes many niche areas of research into single text. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of acknowledging a shift in academic focus away from the lateral interactions between celebrities and politicians (and in some cases celebrities becoming politicians) toward research that engages the American audience, as consumers of media, as a critical political component. The volume offers a collection of diverse research on questions treating the effects of fictional media on consumer audiences and the larger implications for American politics. This research collection offers both qualitative and quantitative data sources and showcases a variety of methodological approaches (experimental design, public opinion survey analysis, content analysis, etc.), robust theoretical applications, and encompasses a variety of conduits, ranging from television sitcoms to horror films to the action drama 24, that make it both compelling and timely.