Field Experiments Invoking Gloating Villains to Increase Voter Participation: Anger, Anticipated Emotions, and Voting Turnout

Abstract In two field experiments conducted in Mississippi and Florida, we present novel evidence about how emotions can be harnessed to increase voter turnout. When we inform respondents that a partisan villain would be happy if they did not vote (for example, a Gloating Villain treatment), we find that anger is activated in comparison to other emotions and turnout increases by 1.7 percentage points. In a subsequent field experiment, we benchmark this treatment to a standard GOTV message, the social pressure treatment. Using survey experiments that replicate our field experimental treatments, we show that our treatment links the act of voting to anticipated anger. In doing so, we contribute the first in-the-field evidence of how we can induce emotions, which are commonly understood to be fleeting states, to shape temporally distant political behaviours such as voting.