Title: Campaigning Against Populism: Emotions and Information in Real Election Campaigns (with Cesi Cruz and Francesco Trebbi).

 Abstract:

Across the world, politics is dominated by populists who are adept at using new forms of campaigning to reach citizens directly and spread, often through emotional appeals, their ideology. The challenge for mainstream parties has been how to articulate policy platforms and campaign promises in this new context. In particular, do forms of campaigning used by populist politicians -- direct in-person appeals and emotional messaging -- work for programmatic and platform-based politicians as well? We implement a field experiment during the 2019 Philippine Senate election with a mainstream opposition party to explore the effectiveness of: (i) their door-to-door visits delivering policy platform information to assess the role of direct appeals; (ii) the addition of explicit emotional messaging in mediating these interactions. We show that direct appeals and emotional messaging foster increased engagement with the campaign in the short term, but that over time the in-person policy information is more relevant in driving vote choice for programmatic parties, even when facing populist incumbents. The treatments operated through a persuasion channel, as treated voters were more likely to know the party, more certain, and gave higher ratings to the party's quality and proposed policies.