Mobilization Under Threat: Emotional Appeals and Pro-Opposition Political Participation Online

Information and communication technology (ICT), including social media, has become a common channel for citizen mobilization in autocracies around the world. While ICT is clearly not a purely pro-democratic force (King et al., 2017; Roberts, 2018), its potential to spread information and invigorate citizen participation both on- and offline has been demonstrated in cases like Egypt, Iran, China, and Burkina Faso. In Zimbabwe, for example, videos made by a pastor who draped himself in the Zimbabwean flag and recorded irate messages about the state of the economy in the summer of 2016 spread quickly on social media and drove participation in protests.¹ The fact that internet shutdowns and arrests of social media activists have become a common element in the autocrat’s toolkit suggests that authoritarian regimes are also well aware of ICT’s potential to mobilize opposition movements that threaten their hold on power (Freedom House, 2019).

Despite widespread recognition that ICT has become a battlefield for pro- and anti-democratic forces, we know little about how pro-opposition participation online actually occurs. Do the strategies of political entrepreneurs make a difference in whether or not people participate in pro-opposition politics online, for instance by joining the Facebook group of an opposition party, sharing its campaign materials via WhatsApp, or expressing support for the opposition on Twitter? If so, what strategies are most effective in mobilizing online pro-opposition participation in non-democratic states? Furthermore, while ICT has typically been conceptualized as a means of spreading information, it clearly also transmits intense emotional content. Does that emotional content have an important effect on subsequent mobilization, or should it be seen as an irrelevant part of the packaging of information about others’ preferences and actions?

This article sheds light on these questions through an online field experiment conducted in partnership with an opposition political party called Transform Zimbabwe (TZ) in the spring of 2015. Zimbabwe is an electoral autocracy where the ruling party holds regular elections but uses a range of tactics including state repression to ensure that the opposition has little chance of taking power. In the experiment TZ tested two versions of an emotional appeal that targeted the emotions of anger or enthusiasm by using different images, music, and slight changes in wording while carrying the same informational content. The anger versions of the appeal highlighted economic grievances, while the enthusiasm versions only described the party’s positive vision for the future without any negative emotional content. These appeals were randomly assigned to geographically-based WhatsApp groups of TZ’s supporters that were then tracked for the following 24 hours. This research design thus tests whether the emotional valence of an opposition party’s messages affects online mobilization.

The results show that the anger appeal led to significantly more pro-opposition participation online. Specifically, participation was 0.38 standard deviations higher in groups that received the anger appeal compared to those that received the enthusiasm appeal on an index of four different measures of pro-opposition participation constructed from the WhatsApp group transcripts in the 24 h after the appeals were sent out. This translates into an average of 1.8 additional messages sent out, 0.6 additional participants, 0.3 additional repetitions of the party slogan, and one additional party symbol being sent out in the groups that received the anger appeal compared to the groups that received the enthusiasm appeal. The effects of the anger appeal were largely consistent across different types of constituencies. These findings suggest that anger can be an important driver of online political mobilization in authoritarian contexts for many different types of citizens.

This study is part of a growing literature on the role of ICT in contentious politics. It is clear that ICT has become a key tool for activists trying to mobilize expressions of dissent in many cases (Breuer et al., 2015; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012). However, we lack a strong empirical understanding of how ICT may mobilize citizens, and existing studies have tended to theorize ICT as facilitating the spread of information and reducing coordination costs (Enikolopov et al., 2020; Little, 2016; Zeitzoff, 2017). This study shows that even holding information constant, the emotional content transmitted over social media can have a powerful mobilizing effect. This article thus provides additional evidence to the argument by Jost et al. (2018) that social media shapes protest participation by transmitting not only information but also content that affects motivation including messages emphasizing anger, social identification, and collective efficacy. This article joins a growing body of research on the determinants of online political participation in contexts characterized by repression or other forms of coercive violence (Barberá et al., 2015; Pan & Siegel, 2020).

More broadly, this study contributes to a literature on whether the mobilizing strategies of opposition political parties and activists matter. Previous scholars have argued that the mobilization strategies of political parties can explain transitions to democracy (Bunce & Wolchik, 2011), opposition party vote share and consolidation (LeBas, 2011), and party identification (Bratton et al., 2012). One key factor in this literature is the extent to which opposition parties employ grievance-based strategies similar to the anger appeals studied here. Group-based grievance appeals have been cited as key mobilizing tactics for parties in emerging multiethnic democracies (Horowitz, 1985), populist right-wing parties in Europe (Ivarsflaten, 2008), and the Republican Party in the U.S. (Valentino et al., 2002). Recent research has used survey experiments to test for the effectiveness of grievance-based electoral appeals in Kenya (Horowitz & Klaus, 2020). While Horowitz and Klaus (2020) find that explicit grievance appeals increase support among only a small subset of voters, the results of this online field experiment show that the anger-based partisan grievance appeal increased participation across a broad range of demographic groups. The findings here also extend research on the effects of partisan emotional appeals from developed democracies like the U.S. to non-democratic settings (Brader, 2006; Miller & Krosnick, 2004; Ryan 2012; Weber, 2013).

Decisions about political participation are made in emotional environments. The perceived stakes of political outcomes–whether a candidate who represents your group is elected, whether policies that will bring real benefits or harms to you will be put into place–are high, and often involve a moral dimension. Political decisions may be even more emotional in non-democratic regimes where the threat of state repression can lead to acute anger and fear among citizens critical of the regime.

A large body of research in psychology and political psychology argues that distinct emotions can have causal effects on subsequent political behavior. Psychologists differ in the emphasis that they place on the cognitive versus non-cognitive channels through which emotions might affect behavior. Some have argued that these pre-cognitive “action tendencies” enable organisms to react to a potentially valuable or dangerous stimulus faster than the logical response to that stimulus can be formulated (LeDoux, 1996; Nico, 1986). Others emphasize the way that emotions arise from and reinforce cognitive appraisals such as perceptions of responsibility, individual control, and certainty (Lerner & Keltner, 2000).

Because of the effects they can have on behavior, emotions are frequently invoked during political campaigns in both democracies and non-democracies. Political messages appeal to anger about the state of the nation, enthusiasm for a candidate or policy, and fear of national or group-based threats should a certain candidate be elected (Ridout & Searles, 2011). In less democratic environments, fear appeals may also involve threats directed at individuals or groups (Young, 2019). Brader (2006, pp. 68–69) defines an emotional appeal as “any communication that is intended to elicit an emotional response from some or all who receive it.” The literature on emotional appeals in politics also recognizes that emotional appeals can work through both cognitive and non-cognitive channels. First, emotional appeals may trigger automatic responses. Activists, for instance, describe putting people into “attack mode” by transforming “inchoate anxieties and fears... into moral indignation and anger toward concrete policies and decision-makers” (Jasper, 2008, p. 107). Second, emotional appeals may change how cognitive processes function. Emotions in political communications may make their targets more hasty in their decision-making, less skeptical, or more likely to question their preexisting beliefs (Albertson & Gadarian, 2015). Emotional appeals are transmitted through images, sounds, and ideas that trigger emotional responses (Brader, 2006). Research in established democracies has tended to study emotional appeals in televised advertisements (Brader, 2006). In many non-democratic settings, which tend to be lower-income, emotional appeals are also frequently transmitted through channels like radio, face-to-face rallies, or increasingly, low-cost ICT like Facebook and WhatsApp.

How might appeals with different emotional content affect participation in online pro-opposition groups? Emotions are commonly disaggregated based on their valence and activation. Emotional valence represents the extent to which an emotion is positive or negative, while activation refers to its level of mobilization or energy (Barrett & Russell, 1999). Other scholars have argued that emotions should also be characterized by a third dimension called “motivational direction” that links emotions to either approach or avoidance tendencies (Harmon-Jones et al., 2013). In this three-dimensional space, anger and enthusiasm are both high-activation, approach-oriented emotions that differ in their valence: negative for anger, and positive for enthusiasm. The fact that anger and enthusiasm are both approach-oriented emotions helps explain their common use in emotional appeals designed to compel action.

Yet while both anger and enthusiasm are high in activation and motivational approach, anger may have a particularly powerful mobilizing effect. Enthusiasm is activated when progress towards incentives exceeds expectations, or has the potential to do so, while anger is triggered when progress is blocked (Frijda, 1986). Anger is thus associated with a desire to change the status quo, remove obstacles, or hurt a target (Frijda et al., 1989; Roseman et al., 1994). These behavioral tendencies are supported at least in part by shifts in attributions associated with the emotion of anger: anger has been shown in experiments to increase perceptions that others are responsible for negative states, decrease perceptions of risks, increase heuristic processing, and increase preferences for punitive or aggressive policies or actions (Bodenhausen et al., 1994; Goldberg et al., 1999; Keltner et al., 1993; Lerner & Keltner, 2001; Lerner et al., 1998, 2003). Indeed, the idea that anger induced by political or economic grievances is a powerful mobilizing tool is grounded in many foundational theories of mass mobilization (Bratton & Van de Walle 1992; Gurr, 1970; Pearlman, 2013; Scott, 1990). For all of these reasons, I expected that an anger appeal would ultimately generate more pro-opposition action than an enthusiasm appeal (Prediction 1).²

In addition to this overall prediction, the literature on emotions and decision-making suggests that anger appeals might be especially effective in particular circumstances. Emotional appeals are ultimately only attempts to induce a particular emotion that may be more or less successful depending on the characteristics of the recipient or circumstances of the appeal. Anger is believed to stem from underlying “cognitive appraisals” that may resonate to different degrees with different groups: that the individual has been blocked from attaining an important goal, that the cause of that frustrated goal is an external agent’s illegitimate action, and a sense of personal control or coping ability (Berkowitz & Harmon-Jones, 2004; Lerner & Keltner, 2000; Richard, 1991; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). When an anger appeal activates these appraisals, it should succeed in inducing anger in its recipient; when it does not, it could actually induce sadness, fear, or despair. This implies that anger appeals may be particularly effective in mobilizing people for whom these underlying appraisals are most likely to resonate, and when combined with other messaging that reinforces the appraisals.

One characteristic that might make it more likely that an anger appeal resonates is socioeonomic status. One of the core cognitive appraisals underlying the emotion of anger is a sense of personal control or coping ability. When individuals believe that they are unable to cope with a negative situation, then they should be more likely to react with fear instead of anger (Bandura, 1988). An obvious factor shaping individual coping ability—both real and perceived—is socioeconomic status (SES). Higher-SES individuals might be particularly likely to react to an anger appeal with anger and action because they are more likely to judge that they are actually able to effectively cope with the negative situation being highlighted in the appeal. In addition, higher SES over the course of a lifetime may be associated with psychological characteristics that make individuals more likely to react angrily in a negative situation (Bandura, 1982). This logic suggests that the anger appeals would have a larger impact in areas with higher socioeconomic status (Prediction 2).

A second demographic characteristic that might shape the effectiveness of anger appeals is the severity of the threat of state repression. Individuals in areas where state repression is more prevalent may harbor stronger grievances against the ruling party and thus be more likely to adopt the appraisals that the economic failures highlighted in the anger appeals are in fact due to the willful, illegitimate acts of the ruling party. In addition, anger may have a particularly powerful effect on political participation to the extent that it enables action by reducing the perceived risk of repression (Lerner & Keltner, 2001). The perceived risk of repression should be particularly high in places where opposition supporters have actually faced repression in the past, whereas in places that have experienced no repression, the risk of repression may not be a real constraint on pro-opposition participation. Thus, I expected that anger appeals would have an even larger impact in areas that have experienced more past repression (Prediction 3).³

Finally, anger appeals might be particularly effective in conjunction with messages that reinforce their underlying appraisals. Many emotional appeals also contain messages that emphasize personal efficacy, power, or control (Tannenbaum et al., 2015). In the case of anger appeals, messages that further reinforce appraisals of personal control or coping ability might increase the likelihood that the viewer actually feels anger instead of demobilizing negative emotions like sadness or fear. Thus, I expected that the anger appeal would be more effective in conjunction with messages that emphasize personal power and control (Prediction 4).

Since gaining independence in 1980, Zimbabwe has held regular, contested elections but these have not resulted in a peaceful transition of power. The ruling party ZANU-PF, which has been in power for the past 40 years, grew out of the independence struggle and enjoyed high initial popular support that diminished in the 1990s (LeBas, 2011). In 1999, a viable opposition movement emerged and dealt ZANU-PF a surprise loss in a constitutional referendum. For the past 20 years, politics in Zimbabwe has revolved around competition between ZANU-PF and the main opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). Various splinter parties have emerged from these two major parties and have almost always either disappeared or re-integrated into their parent parties.

ZANU-PF has been able to remain in power through a variety of tactics. Its ability to maintain control is thanks in part to legitimate appeals to voters, including its liberation struggle credentials and some popular policies such as a redistributive land reform program. However, in periods when popular support has eroded, ZANU-PF has politicized the resources of the state to use in clientelistic transactions and has relied heavily on the threat of repression through state security forces and state-aligned civil society groups.

There have been three major episodes of state repression in post-independence Zimbabwe. First, shortly after independence in the 1980s, ZANU-PF deployed the newly created armed forces into the Matabeleland region, whose inhabitants had supported a rival liberation movement and were seen as a threat to the new state. As many as 20,000 Zimbabweans were killed by the government during this period (CCJPZ, 1997). Second, after the emergence of the MDC, ZANU-PF began using the security forces and a range of party-affiliated social groups to repress opposition candidates, organizers, and supporters (LeBas, 2006; Sachikonye, 2011). This wave of repression peaked in 2008, when the MDC won the first round of the presidential election and cost ZANU-PF its legislative majority (Bratton & Masunungure, 2008; Human Rights Watch, 2008). After 2008, a “Government of National Unity” was formed out of negotiations with the international community, and the MDC’s popular support began to weaken as the economic crisis receded. State repression receded between 2008 and 2018, and ZANU-PF won large parliamentary majorities in elections in 2013 and 2018 without widespread pre-election violence. However, the 2018 elections ushered in a third phase of active repression, as a new, less adept ZANU-PF president who came into power in a 2017 military coup has relied heavily on the security forces to quash post-election and economic protests (Beardsworth et al., 2019).

This study took place during a period of low repression and opposition fragmentation in the wake of the MDC’s weak performance in the 2013 elections. Transform Zimbabwe (TZ) is run by a former MDC youth leader, and staffed by many former MDC activists. In 2017, TZ re-merged with the main MDC faction to compete in the 2018 elections under the banner of the “MDC Alliance.” At the time of this study, TZ was building grassroots structures and competing in by-elections to fill empty parliamentary seats.

The MDC and MDC-aligned opposition parties like TZ have historically used both positive and negative campaign messages, often invoking the emotions of enthusiasm and anger, to mobilize voters. The opposition has long had a strong, albeit somewhat general, positive policy platform. The MDC and TZ both emphasize a moderate social democratic policy platform that includes increasing access to education and health services (Zamchiya, 2013). Some analysts, however, have argued that this broad positive economic platform fails to mobilize Zimbabwean voters (Makgetlaneng, 2005; Southall, 2013). TZ also uses a significant amount of religious (Christian) messaging in their positive appeals. In addition to these positive messages, the opposition has a long history of using the ruling party’s economic failings to mobilize voters. Economic demonstrations, strikes, stayaways, and food riots led by the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) in the 1990s laid a critical foundation for the formation of the MDC (McCandless, 2011). Protests around economic grievances including price increases and electoral irregularities have continued to play a pivotal role in the opposition’s strategy for mobilizing voters. In the years prior to this experiment, TZ also frequently used direct attacks on the ruling party for corruption and economic mismanagement in its speeches and communications with its supporters.

Estimating the causal impact of emotional appeals on political mobilization in a repressive environment is difficult for a number of reasons. First, identifying the causal impact of emotions requires exogenous variation in exposure to emotional appeals. Without exogenous variation, it is impossible to isolate the effect of the emotional appeal from factors that might drive supporters to select into exposure. In this case, I use random assignment of opposition supporters to different emotional appeals to identify the impact of emotions on action.

Second, isolating the effect of emotions requires that the information in the messages be held constant. Importantly, the need to hold information constant implies that the anger messages must be compared to a placebo message instead of a pure control. To hold information constant, TZ agreed to create two versions of the same ad that differed only in the images, music, and small variations in wording. In both messages, the images depict generic, common scenes that all Zimbabweans recognize such as country roads, clinics, and homesteads. The text in both versions of the appeals provides the same information about the party’s position and the state of the nation.

Third, studying political participation in an electoral autocracy comes with significant ethical considerations. This project would not have been possible without the collaboration of an opposition party that was interested in empirically testing how to mobilize its supporters. TZ regularly sends out communications to its supporters and did not fundamentally change its operations during the course of this experiment; they only introduced random variation in the specific messages that went out at a given time. TZ crafted and produced the messages and created and managed the chat groups. The researcher’s role was to provide information on the research design and to analyze the anonymized data. TZ’s supporters voluntarily joined the WhatsApp groups with knowledge that they would be receiving political messages. To formalize this agreement, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the president of TZ and the provost of Columbia University that detailed each party’s role and responsibilities. Because of this delimitation of roles, this research was determined not to involve human subjects by the Columbia University IRB.

Fourth, we wanted to measure an outcome that was at once behavioral, meaningful, and within the level of risk that TZ’s supporters had accepted to take when they joined the groups. Although TZ also mobilizes its supporters to engage in offline actions such as rallies, for the experiment we decided to focus on the lower-risk outcome of political speech. Opposition supporters believe that political speech, including on social media, is taken seriously by the regime. Around the time of the experiment, a meme making fun of a stumble by the nonagenarian president was being circulated, along with rumors that the police and secret service were randomly entering buses and sanctioning people if they had these images on their phones. Nevertheless, data collected by organizations tracking political violence in Zimbabwe and media reports at the time show few actual cases of citizens being targeted with sanctions for speech, particularly for speech made in private chat groups like the TZ WhatsApp groups.

Millions of citizens speak out against non-democratic regimes despite the risk of reprisals. How do opposition parties mobilize citizens in non-democratic settings? I argue that emotional appeals invoking anger play a role in overcoming the collective action dilemma that opposition supporters face. Theory from psychology predicts that anger should make individuals more likely to take action through a number of channels, including by influencing how individuals perceive risks and their level of inhibition. This implies that opposition parties that can craft effective anger appeals may be able to induce higher levels of participation, at least in the short term.

This study tests whether and when appeals that invoke anger rather than enthusiasm are more effective in mobilizing opposition supporters to participate online in a repressive environment. In order to identify the causal effect of anger appeals, I analyze an experiment run by a Zimbabwean opposition party that tested the effectiveness of campaign messages with the same informational content but different emotional valences. This research design enables a test of opposition mobilization that identifies the casual role of emotional appeals over social media on a behavioral measure of political action.

The results are in line with the expectation that anger over economic grievances can be harnessed by opposition movements to mobilize their supporters. The anger appeal induced significantly more expressions of support for the opposition party than the pure enthusiasm appeal. These differences are substantively meaningful, representing between 30 and 170% increases over the enthusiasm groups across four measures of participation. The anger appeal was more effective across many types of constituencies, not only those with the most capacity to take action or the strongest political grievances.

Why was the anger appeal more effective? The most straightforward explanation, and one in line with the results of the manipulation check based on the text of the WhatsApp messages, is that it succeeded in its goal of inducing more anger than the enthusiasm appeal. However, a few other explanations are also plausible. First, the manipulation check also showed that the anger appeal induced more enthusiasm than the purely enthusiastic appeal. Second, it is possible that the anger appeals, which focused on the gap between expectations and reality in Zimbabwe, may have primed a higher tolerance for risk by putting TZ supporters in the domain of losses. Future research, perhaps using lab experimental methods that enable more refined measurement, could try to separately parse out these mechanisms. In this case, given that all of the informational content of the two versions of the appeals were the same, the greater levels of enthusiasm and any potential effects on loss aversion could be inseparable downstream effects of anger.

These findings suggest that the mobilizing strategies of opposition parties and activists matter, and that more confrontational, grievance-based strategies can be particularly effective in mobilizing immediate participation. Scholars have long emphasized that political entrepreneurs can mobilize risky forms of participation using grievance appeals. The findings also support a more nuanced view of the role of ICT in facilitating expressions of dissent. While much of the literature on ICT has emphasized its importance in spreading information or lowering the cost of coordination among opposition members, this study suggests that the emotional content disseminated via ICT can also have a potent mobilizing effect.

Might these findings extend to participation in higher stakes forms of political participation, such as protest attendance or pro-opposition voting? Some have criticized online political participation as “slacktivism” and argued that it crowds out participation in more traditional forms of collective action. However, recent research suggests that online communications in non-democratic settings can spur offline political participation (Larson et al., 2019; Steinert-Threlkeld et al., 2015). Recent observational work has found that the expansion of access to technology such as cell phone networks caused increases in participation in protest (Manacorda & Tesei, 2020; Christensen & Garfias, 2018), and that receiving information about protest via social media is associated with intentions to participate in offline forms of protest (LeBas & Young, 2020). Part of the mechanism linking online participation to offline action in non-democratic settings may be that online participation builds second-order beliefs about pro-opposition action, breaking patterns of preference falsification (Kuran, 1991, 1995). Opposition political parties like Transform Zimbabwe need to convince skeptical supporters that they have enough latent support to unseat an entrenched, authoritarian incumbent. Demonstrating that they are able to mobilize citizens by engaging them in acts of collective political participation is a logical way to build that credibility.

What should opposition parties operating in non-democratic environments draw from these results? Clearly, anger appeals can be a powerful mobilizing force. However, these results do not suggest that opposition parties can maximize engagement by only invoking anger. First, it is important to note that the anger appeals both highlighted the service delivery failures of an incumbent regime, and reminded supporters that they could provide a better alternative. Second, the results in this article show that anger appeals work for a subset of supporters who are already fairly committed to a political party. Anger appeals may be less effective in mobilizing citizens who are less ideologically aligned with the opposition or more reluctant to take action. Finally, it is plausible that anger appeals may lose their potency and even cause supporters to become fatigued or disaffected if used frequently. A conservative interpretation of the results of this experiment is that anger appeals can have powerful short-term mobilizing effects in conjunction with a credible positive message. Anger appeals are thus not an alternative but probably a complement to the longer-term work of building a positive party identity and grassroots mobilizing structure.