Emotive Communication during Election Campaigns in Three European Countries

• In Event: The Role of Emotions in Political Communication

Abstract

The emotional content of political messaging has received increased attention in recent years, spurred in part by the much greater opportunities for unmediated mass communication with the public through online and (especially) social media. This is significant given that political actors have long shown their capacity to deploy emotion in a strategic way (e.g. Hall and Ross 2015) and prior research has established that at least some emotive content has the potential to attract attention and shift opinion among members of the public (e.g. Gerstlé and Nai 2019). Specific emotions are linked both with ideological preferences (e.g. Aarøe, Petersen, and Arceneaux 2017, 2020; Kettle and Salerno, 2017) and preferences for continuity or change (e.g. Field, 2020).

However, the use of emotive communication during elections has remained somewhat understudied outside of North America (particularly the US), and comparative studies are particularly limited (Weber 2018). This restricts the generalisability of findings within the bounds of geography, language, political culture, and electoral systems. While the study of emotion as a factor in political outlook and public opinion has become more popular in European case studies (e.g. Bakker et al., 2021; Vasilopoulou and Wagner 2017; Vasilopoulos 2018), the emotional content of political rhetoric—compared to, say, the ‘felt states’ of study participants—remains underused as a data source.

As part of a wider research programme examining this phenomenon in the European context, this paper explores the emotive styles used by political parties during the ‘short campaigns’ of recent general parliamentary elections in three European countries: the United Kingdom (2019), Ireland (2020), and Iceland (2021). Primary data are sourced from the online messages produced by each party, forming a novel dataset of Facebook posts from official party accounts (n = 4,155). Quantitative text analysis is used to determine the emotional ‘palette’ employed by each party, and these secondary data are used to test whether parties differ in their emotional strategies along predictable lines, based on each party’s ideological position and power status (government versus opposition).

The findings of this paper both support and challenge existing research in the field of emotive political communication. By illustrating that the basic principle of particular political parties preferring particular emotional styles extends into Europe, this study adds robustness: not only is the ‘testing ground’ located in a new geography, but the variation of political cultures and electoral systems in this comparative study offer a departure from the more dyadic political competition seen in the US case studies that dominate the existing literature. However, the variation between these countries and their parties—both in terms of the specific preferences for particular emotions and the overall preference for emotive rhetoric—complicate our existing assumptions and offer new directions for further research into emotive campaigning rhetoric.

Author

• Luke Field, University of Iceland