Emotional politics: Moving and upsetting political ads on the motivation to support candidate and party

Political campaigning is an inherent part of politics to recruit support from voters. Video advertisement for a political candidate or party has been a widely used method for many years, distributed via television and online, including social media. This type of advertisement attempts to recruit support by presenting convincing arguments and evoking various emotions about the candidate, opponents, and policy proposals. In the present paper, we review existing work on what emotions are most prevalent, focusing particularly on anger and enthusiasm. We discuss recent arguments and evidence that a specific social emotion, namely the concept kama muta, plays a role in political advertisements. In vernacular language, kama muta is typically labeled being moved or touched. Seminal video examples from the 2016 U.S. presidential campaigns are known to evoke this emotion. We compare anger and kama muta theoretically and discuss how they can influence voters’ willingness to support a candidate. We then, for the first time, compare kama muta and anger empirically in the same study. Specifically, we showed American participants short political ads from the 2018 U.S. midterm elections that either evoked anger or kama muta and came from either Democratic or Republican candidates. We assessed participants' degree of being angered and moved by the videos and their motivation for three types of political support: ideational, financial and personal. Participants were more angered by the selected anger-evoking videos and more moved by the selected moving videos of the party which they identified with more. They were also more motivated to support the advertised candidate and party in different ways if either emotion was elicited. If an emotion was evoked, its effect on political support was largely independent from the prior support for the party. In other words, elicitation, but not impact, of an emotion is moderated by prior social identification in the context of political advertisement. We discuss limitations of the method and implications of the results for future research and practice.

After the madhouses: the emotional politics of psychiatry and community care in the UK tabloid press 1980–1995

The deinstitutionalisation of mental hospital patients made its way into UK statutory law in 1990 in the form of the NHS and the Community Care Act. The Act ushered in the final stage of asylum closures moving the responsibility for the long-term care of mentally ill individuals out of the NHS and into the hands of local authorities. This article examines the reaction to the passing of the Act in two major tabloid presses, The Sun and The Daily Mirror, in order to reveal how community care changed the emotional terrain of tabloid storytelling on mental health. Reviewing an archive of 15 years of tabloid reporting on mental illness, I argue that the generation of ‘objects of feeling’ in the tabloid media is dependent on the availability of recognisable and stable symbols. Tabloid reporting of mental illness before 1990 reveals the dominance of the image of the asylum in popular understandings of mental illness. Here the asylum is used to generate objects of hatred and disgust for the reader, even as it performs a straightforward othering and distancing function. In these articles, the image of the asylum and its implicit separation of different types of madness into categories also do normative gender work as mental illness is represented along predictable gendered stereotypes. By performing the abolition of asylums, the 1990 Act appears to have triggered a dislodging of these narrative norms in the tabloid press. After 1990, ‘asylum stories’ are replaced with ‘community care stories’ which contain more contradictory and confusing clusters of feeling. These stories rest less heavily on gendered binaries while also demonstrating a near-frantic desire on the part of the mass media for a return of institutional containment. Here, clusters of feeling becoming briefly ‘unstuck’ from their previous organisations, creating a moment of affective flux.

The Emotional Politics of Limerence in Romantic Comedy Films

“Limerence” describes the intensity of emotions often felt during the pair-forming stage of a romantic relationship, a period that is also the primary focus of many romantic comedy films. This chapter asks how filmmakers have used depictions of limerence to highlight spaces in which its potential for both disruption and loving care could be brought to political spheres. I look at a series of millennial romantic comedies that express emotional upheaval, vulnerability, and openness to change as qualities of relevance to both a romantic and a political selfhood. These “political romcoms” reveal a range of dynamic relations between notions of character competence, moral fiber, personality, and deservedness, and invite investigation of complex emotions that modify a more generalized positive affect associated with romantic comedy cinema: humiliation as a comic device and the existential fear of rejection.

Thinking and Feeling Homosexuality

This chapter puts ambivalence over sex and self-presentation centre-stage, by focusing first on debates over drag and gender transgression, and then on the equivocal position of sex and desire in homosexual politics. While some activists embraced effeminacy for personal and for political reasons, drag was not always compatible with the model of masculinity favoured by many other activists, who sometimes accused Tunten (‘queens’) of endangering the chance of left-wing support. Turning to how sex featured in gay activism, the chapter shows how a shared antipathy to the gay scene, and sites of sexual activity, resembled an important point of connection between gay action groups and more ‘moderate’ homosexual organizations. The final third of the chapter historicizes the emotional politics of gay liberation. After identifying the gay scene as a major culprit for psychological distress in queer life, activists set about imagining alternatives. In this concluding section, the rise of consciousness-raising and self-help groups, and of the first telephone crisis helplines, is set against changing psychological attitudes towards homosexuality.

Figures of Authority in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

This interdisciplinary collection investigates the forms that authority assumed in nineteenth-century Ireland, the relations they bore to international redefinitions of authority, and Irish contributions to the reshaping of authority in the modern age. At a time when age-old sources of social, political, spiritual and cultural authority were eroded in the Western world, Ireland witnessed both the restoration of older forms of authority and the rise of figures who defined new models of authority in a democratic age. Using new comparative perspectives as well as archival resources in a wide range of fields, eleven chapters show how new authorities were embodied in emerging types of politicians, clerics and professionals, and in material extensions of their power in visual, oral and print cultures. Their analyses often eerily echo twenty-first-century debates about populism, the suspicion towards scholarly and intellectual expertise, and the role of new technologies and forms of association in contesting and recreating authority. Several contributions highlight the role of emotion in the way authority was deployed by figures ranging from O’Connell to Catholic priests and W.B. Yeats, foreshadowing the perceived rise of emotional politics in our own age. This volume stresses that many contested forms of authority that now look ‘traditional’ emerged from 19th-century crises and developments, as did the challenges that undermine authority.

Delighting and Detesting Engagement: Emotional Politics of Junk News

How do audiences make sense of and interact with political junk news on Facebook? How does the platform’s “emotional architecture” intervene in these sense-making, interactive processes? What kinds of mediated publics emerge on and through Facebook as a result? We study these questions through topic modeling 40,500 junk news articles, quantitatively analyzing their engagement metrics, and a qualitative comment analysis. This exploratory research design allows us to move between levels of public discourse, zooming in from cross-outlet talking points to microsociological processes of meaning-making, interaction, and emotional entrainment taking place within the comment boxes themselves. We propose the concepts of delighting and detesting engagement to illustrate how the interplay between audiences, platform architecture, and political junk news generates a bivalent emotional dynamic that routinely divides posts into highly “loved” and highly “angering.” We argue that high-performing (or in everyday parlance, viral) junk news bring otherwise disparate audience members together and orient their dramatic focus toward objects of collective joy, anger, or concern. In this context, the nature of political junk news is performative as they become resources for emotional signaling and the construction of group identity and shared feeling on social media. The emotions that animate junk news audiences typically refer back to a transpiring social relationship between two political sides. This affectively loaded “us” versus “them” dynamic is both enforced by Facebook’s emotional architecture and made use of by junk news publishers.

Cold War Angst

This chapter analyzes Cold War fears. The emotional politics of the West German Cold War consisted of a carefully calibrated balance between mobilizing fears of Communism and containing fears of a nuclear war. The chapter demonstrates the function of anti-Communism as a primary fear object in postwar West Germany, which also displayed numerous continuities to the Nazi mobilization of fears of Bolshevism. The chapter then analyzes a failed official attempt to contain fears of a nuclear war through civil defense. It analyzes the production, distribution, and popular reception of the first West German civil defense brochure, “Everybody Has a Chance,” in December 1961. The chapter uses this case study to demonstrate the (mal)functioning of an emotional regime that sought to contain fears and emotions in general in favour of a cool, rational, and male anti-emotionality. The chapter then also provides a multifaceted explanation as to why Cold War fears of nuclear war eventually subsided by the mid 1960s. Changing domestic and international political contexts played an important role, as did a more comprehensive commemorative culture that brought into view Germans as perpetrators rather than primarily as victims.