Release date: March 26, 2004
Contact: Elaine Justice, Associate Director, University Media Relations,
at 404-727-0643 or ejustic@emory.edu

Political Forecasting Looks at Minds of Voters

Instead of relying on factors such as history, polling and approval ratings to forecast voter behavior, Emory psychologist Drew Westen developed a political forecasting model that looks at the role of emotions in how people make decisions about political issues and candidates.

During Clinton's impeachment scandal and again during the last presidential election cycle, Westen conducted four studies of people's emotional and cognitive responses to major political events, most importantly the Lewinsky scandal and subsequent impeachment of Bill Clinton, and the disputed election of 2000. The experiments tested people on their knowledge of the situations, and then asked them about their feelings toward such topics as Bush and Gore, Republicans and Democrats.

"I wanted to understand why, when people are presented with the same information about a political situation, that they overwhelmingly respond along ideological lines, whether as voters, judges or politicians," he says. Data from community samples mirrored the legislative and judicial record.

Westen found that in high stakes, emotionally charged political situations such as Clinton's impeachment and the Florida vote count, underlying emotional preferences overwhelmingly trump cognition and available facts in how people make decisions and take stands on issues. As a result, Westen says that self-reflection is an important part of character for elected leaders and voters so they can distinguish between their emotional and cognitive responses when making decisions on issues.

His model also demonstrates that a successful campaign requires an accurate assessment of the way people are responding emotionally to the candidate, both consciously and unconsciously.

"Candidates who want to win elections need to appeal to people emotionally as well as cognitively, and they would do well to use more indirect methods besides focus groups to assess emotional responses that people may not themselves be able to identify and describe," Westen says. "The biggest implication for candidate strategy is one the Republicans have long understood but the Democrats have been surprisingly slow to recognize: That managing images and nonverbal behaviors is at least as important as making policy statements, particularly in winning the hearts and minds of swing voters, who by definition do not have strong ideological commitments."

Westen is director of clinical psychology at Emory University and holds a joint appointment as a professor in the departments of psychology, and psychiatry and behavioral science. Westen can provide a psychological analysis of political issues, including the psychology of voter behavior and the influence of non-verbal communication on their decision-making. Reach Westen at 404-727-7407 (w), 404-375-6639 (cell) or dwesten@emory.edu.

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