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Persuasion in the Political Context 111

in favor of and the one who is opposed to joining the monetary union
should be the same. Hence, on the graph presented above, the intentions
to vote for the politician in favor of the union and intentions to vote for
the one against the union should overlap. However, this is not the case.
The intention to opt for the politician opposed to the union turns out to
be much higher when compared with the intention to vote for the politi-
cian in favor of the union; this is marked on the graph with an arrow. This
result is in harmony with the predictions made by prospect theory: a loss
is more devastating than the equivalent gain is gratifying. Thus, voters’
incentive to avoid negative changes is greater than their incentive to em-
brace positive changes, and this translates into the strength of voting in-
tentions (see Figure 4.4). This result is also in accord with the results
achieved by Cobb and Kuklinski (1997), who demonstrated that in po-
litical behavior, “con” arguments typically hold more persuasive appeal
than “pro” arguments.
It must also be noted that ambiguous messages considerably increased
the electoral preferences of the two groups of decided voters—those who
opted for or against the adoption of the euro. The level of their preferences
approached the level demonstrated by the neutral voters (see Figure 4.4).
This is an example of how ambiguous messages operate to neutralize the
segmentation of the electoral market based on the pro and con division of
opinions on a particular issue. While unambiguous messages lead to the
electorate’s polarization and thus limit the number of the candidate’s po-
tential voters, using ambiguous messages may help overcome voters’ divi-
sion. In this way, the impact of ambiguous messages precisely matches the
concept of the political triangle presented by Worcester and Mortimore
(2005) and empirically examined in the research on polarization of politi-
cal opinions by Cwalina, Falkowski, and Newman (2011).
The diversity of methods for creating effective persuasive messages in
the context of electoral market segmentation into the decided and unde-
cided electorate can be added to the list of principles that explain the
persuasive appeal of such messages, as discussed earlier in this chapter.
Effective messages should be differently framed based on demographic
and psychographic segmentation, with special emphasis placed on the un-
decided voters in competitive situations.

Negative Framing in Political Advertisements

The research discussed thus far concerning the role of framing in the crea-
tion of the persuasive appeal of a political message proves beyond doubt
that negativity is stronger than positivity or, as Baumeister, Bratslavsky,