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"Media-Effects Experiments in Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

Can political incivility bolster support for American candidates? Conventional wisdom holds that it does and Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victories demonstrate the power of uncivil rhetoric—particularly, when it is paired with racially intolerant rhetoric. However, recent studies have demonstrated that leveraging political incivility can backfire on elites. As such, it is unclear whether uncivil rhetoric has electoral value, or if its utility is bolstered when it is joined by intolerant rhetoric. Leveraging a survey experiment, I find that both political incivility and racial intolerance induce feelings of disgust. The presence of intolerance in a message weakens the effects of incivility on disgust for out-group elites, suggesting that multiple rhetorical norm violations result in diminishing (negative) returns. Moreover, the effects of intolerance on disgust are moderated by a subject's level of racial resentment. These aversive reactions to incivility and intolerance reduce electoral support for the elite sponsoring the message. In-group candidates pay a larger electoral penalty, although the penalty for intolerance is moderated by subject racial resentment. I conclude that, contra claims that political incivility works, uncivil messaging serves as a strategic liability for candidates.

The claim that elite political incivility can rouse partisan, antideliberative attitudes has many adherents, but the empirical record demonstrating a relationship is surprisingly limited. Yet the extant research suggests that incivility can stimulate aversive feelings, of the sort that discrete and dimensional theories of emotion predict should induce a partisan, antideliberative mode of citizenship among those exposed. Leveraging two online experiments, I address the questions of whether elite incivility provokes anger, rather than enthusiasm and anxiety, and whether the affective reactions induced by incivility yield the changes in deliberative attitudes that theories of emotion predict. I find that elite incivility, when counterattitudinal, rouses anger, which in turn can provoke an active and combative form of partisan citizenship. Despite claims to the contrary, the link between proattitudinal incivility, anger, and antideliberative attitudes is less clear. The results provide insight into the dynamics of discourse in the digital age, when affective polarization is the norm and elites commonly employ uncivil rhetoric.