Modulating the Neural Bases of Political Communications: Political Involvement and Perception of the Economic Situation
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Modulating the Neural Bases of Political Communications: Political Involvement and Perception of the Economic Situation Luis‑Alberto Casado‑Aranda1 · Juan Sánchez‑Fernández1 · Teodoro Luque‑Martínez1 Accepted: 2 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Worldwide political parties devote more than half of their budgets to communication campaigns. Yet research on political behavior is not unanimous as to the effect of political campaign communications on the electorate. Certain studies interpret the discrepancy by indicating that individual characteristics may modulate the way citizens perceive political campaigns. The current study is the first to resort to neuroimaging (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI) to explore to what extent two characteristics of the electorate, namely level of political involvement and perception of the economic context, affect the neural processing when exposed to political messages, notably corruption and positive practices. The data reveals that more politically sophisticated citizens experience greater activation of the brain regions linked to aversion and negative processing while viewing messages exposing corruption. Their reward circuit is not, moreover, activated more strongly when exposed to positive political actions. Interestingly, citizens with a better perception of the economic situation reveal stronger activation while exposed to positive political messages in brain regions linked to self-relevance and rewarding properties. The current analysis therefore represents the first neuroimaging study to reveal the psychological mechanisms by which individual characteristics of the electorate affect the processing of political communications. Keywords Political communication · Political behavior · Political involvement · Economic situation · Mass media · Neuropolitics
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-020-09657-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Luis‑Alberto Casado‑Aranda [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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Political Behavior
Introduction Political parties function as businesses. With the goal to attract new sympathizers, they invest great quantities of resources into designing effective political communication campaigns emphasizing both corruption scandals of the opposite party and positive practices of their own members. Despite the fact that this is a common practice, research in political behavior has not reached a consensus as to the effects of positive messages and messages exposing corruption (henceforth “corruption messages”) on voter perception and behavior (Ceron and d’Adda 2016). In the field of political communication, a series of experiments carried out by de Sousa and Moriconi (2013) and Scammell and Langer (2006) emphasize that messages that highlight constructive politics (henceforth “positive messages”) and thos
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