Feeling the Issue: How Citizens' Affective Reactions and Leadership Perceptions Shape Policy Evaluations

This article Examines how general feelings toward political actors shape the way citizens process information about policy issues. Images of political actors are prevalent shortcuts on which we rely during political decision making. A few studies go beyond the cognitive nature of these person-oriented heuristics and demonstrate that affective reactions toward a story protagonist generate swings in the evaluations of policy issues. This research borrows from the literature on persuasion, information processing, affective intelligence, and motivated reasoning to measure how affective responses to the image of a politician determine the way citizens evaluate policy proposals. In this study, an experiment is conducted wherein the name of a politician supporting two actual policy proposals is varied and the corresponding subjects' reactions to the policy content is measured. Findings suggest that the images projected by political candidates function as "gut-level'' affective ( emotional) shortcuts, such that when citizens dislike the source of the policy, they also adjust their policy evaluations downward. There is also evidence of differentiation in the way political images affect policy evaluation on the basis of political knowledge and trust.