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This study investigates how exposure to favorable messages about one's preferred party can affect emotional reactions and subsequent behavioral intentions. Integrating the motivated reasoning and discrete emotions' frameworks, we offer a theoretical framework of motivated mobilization for explaining political engagement in response to poll exposure. Specifically, we examine the mediating role of emotions in the relationship between motivated assessments of polls and political mobilization. To test this model, we offer empirical evidence from an online survey-experiment (N = 540) conducted during the 2019 Indian general election. We find that exposure to favorable poll results increases enthusiasm and decreases anger, while both enthusiasm and anger activate behavioral intention for political participation. While our study supports the existing findings which show that partisanship is an important predictor of mobilization for a party and candidate, we uncover the affective routes through which partisanship operates to shape poll reactions. The results underscore the importance of capturing individual variability in preexisting affiliations and their shaping of poll reactions through affect-driven motivated reactions. We discuss these results with regard to the dynamics of political mobilization during election campaigns, the role of emotions in political cognition at large, and in understanding and mitigating biases in poll perceptions.

In contemporary political discourse, the concern of affective polarization, often fueled by uncivil and sexist discourse, is notably evident in digital communication contexts like WhatsApp. In this study, we examined the potential effects of uncivil and sexist messages as well as moderator interventions against these messages coming from political in- and out-group members in such political groups through a survey experiment ( N = 1,464) fielded during the 2022 Uttar Pradesh (India) Legislative Assembly Elections. We investigate these questions and extend the prior work on affective polarization by introducing a new measure of Average Inter-party Affective Distance, which provides a single metric to index overall polarization in a multi-party election context. Our results showed that exposure to sexist uncivil messages had no discernible effect on affective polarization, political participation, and voting intention. Additionally, moderator warnings against incivility had no significant effects. However, we observed a variation in how respondents processed these messages based on their preexisting attitudes; notably, individuals with less sexist views were more inclined to vote after being exposed to sexist uncivil messages. These findings suggest that the influence of incivility and sexism in messaging platforms like WhatsApp on the wider electorate's political behavior and attitudes is relatively limited. This research contributes to our understanding of the role of digital political communication, highlighting the importance of message content and preexisting individual differences in shaping affective polarization and mobilization.

AbstractThis study leverages a survey experiment in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election to evaluate how partisan biases, poll results, and their methodological quality interact to shape people's assessments of polling accuracy and electoral expectations. In a nationally representative sample, we find that individuals disproportionately find polls more credible when their preferred candidate is leading. Partisan biases are mitigated when the polls themselves vary in objective indicators of quality: while more educated respondents are more likely to identify high-quality polls accurately, low education respondents' bias was reduced when they encountered polls with varying methodological quality. Finally, these moderators influence respondents' electoral expectations as well. We discuss the implications for journalistic coverage of polls, public opinion, and political polarization.

Although social media are increasingly used through mobile devices, the differences between mobile and computer-based practices remain unclear. This study attempts to tease out some of these differences through multiple analytical strategies and samples. Drawing on theoretical expectations about the affordances, motivations, and cognition of mobile use, we investigate who uses mobile Facebook, why they use it, and how they use it. To do this, we first compare those who use Facebook only on a PC with those who also use the service on mobile devices. Then, in order to quantify mobile Facebook use, we propose a new set of survey measures to tap into more and less mobile users among the sample of people who access Facebook through multiple modes. These questions serve to validate measures of mobile Facebook use, and allow us to examine how patterns of use relate to user motivations and experiences. Findings revealed important differences between PC-only and mobile users as well as a distinct and reliable measure of mobileness. Whereas motivations for Facebook use did not differ across users, more habitual and absorbing use of Facebook was strongly, positively associated with mobile practices. These findings illustrate that people use mobile Facebook in more automatic and immersive ways that are independent of overall frequency of use or motivations. Implications for the psychological mechanisms involved in mobile communication, as well as survey measurement of social media use, are discussed.