Communicating crisis news amid polarization: how political affiliations influence information processing of a political crisis

Scholars widely agree that emotions constitute a fundamental element of political communication. Few would dispute that emotions play a significant role in shaping political discourse and influencing information processing. With the deepening political polarization and partisan antipathy, even a simple cue signaling a partisanship may trigger emotional responses and determine the politically polarized information processing. Based on cognitive and emotion theorizations, this research reports how a confirmation bias cue (i.e., a Democrat or a Republican politician) evokes emotions, resulting in evaluations of a political crisis along political affiliations. An online experiment (N = 184) presented a political crisis news story with a politician’s party as a triggering cue to investigate how participants’ political affiliation and the party of the politician interact to create emotional reactions (sympathy and anger), which in turn lead to the intention to vote for the politician in the news. Findings show that Democratic study participants expressed more sympathy, less anger, and a higher intention to vote when the politician in the crisis news was a Democrat, while Republicans showed opposite reactions. The reverse pattern was observed when the politician in the news was a Republican. The study also examines the underlying mediation mechanism, where emotions mediate the interaction effects between participants’ party affiliation and the politician's party on the intention to vote for the politician in the news.