Implications of online incidental and selective exposure for political emotions: Affective polarization during elections

The Internet and social media create an environment in which individuals can selectively approach information supporting their political worldviews while also being incidentally exposed to socially shared information that challenges their beliefs. These competing information consumption patterns may help explain whether and how digital media contribute to affective polarization (i.e. affect-based division between political groups). This study examines how pro-attitudinal selective exposure and counter-attitudinal incidental exposure in tandem influence political emotions. Using data from 2, two-wave panel surveys conducted during the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections, our findings demonstrate that seeking consonant political information is consistently associated with anger toward political opponents and enthusiasm toward like-minded partisans. In contrast, despite the purported democratic benefits endowed on political disagreement, cross-cutting incidental exposure does not temper political emotional responses associated with pro-attitudinal selective exposure. However, we find little evidence that unexpected exposure to disagreeable information backfires either.

Developing political compassion through narrative imagination in human rights education

This paper argues that political compassion is a necessary disposition for engaging with human rights principles and combatting social injustices such as racial discrimination. Drawing from Martha Nussbaum’s theory of political emotions, the paper concentrates on the need to understand compassion as connected to cognition and practical reasoning. Moreover, the paper offers suggestions of how to educate towards political compassion in human rights education (HRE) through Nussbaum’s notion of narrative imagination. To capture the multiperspectival and partial dimensions of HRE, the paper further employs the work of critical HRE scholars and emphasises the importance of counter-narratives and reflective interpretation of narratives. Refined by critical considerations, Nussbaum’s work on compassion and narrative imagination provides a new and important perspective for understanding the relation between human rights, emotions and social justice in the context of contemporary HRE theory and practice.

The Rhetoric of Political Emotions in the Internet News Discourse

The paper focuses on the issues of public opinion manipulation and emotionalization of the Internet news discourse. The purpose of this study is to identify the specifics of political emotions and their rhetorical potential in the Internet news discourse. Through the discourse analysis of the statements uttered by politicians and taken from the news stories of the highly circulated British and American online media, political emotions are defined as a particular type of emotions intended to manipulate public opinion both emotionally and politically. The analysis of the rhetorical potential of political emotions reveals that political emotions can be used with the aim of social solidarity, group identification, decision-making, shaping public opinion, discrediting the opponent, polarizing social groups as well as enhancing the public image of a politician in the Internet news discourse. The findings provide the support for the hypothesis that political emotions play an important role in modern argumentation, leaving the facts behind and becoming a key factor that determines the credibility of information in the modern online media. The results of this study can be applied in the field of linguistics, journalism, psychology and political science. A range of implications for understanding the complex nature of emotions and their key role in the Internet news discourse is explored.

August Winnig: From Proletariat to Workerdom, in the Name of the People

In the social imaginaries that sustained Nazi ideology from the 1920s through the 1930s, Arbeitertum, translated here as “workerdom,” played a key role in integrating socialist positions into the discourse of the Volksgemeinschaft. Workerdom proved essential for translating the class-based identifications associated with the proletariat into the race-based categories that redefined the people, and hence the workers, in line with antisemitic thought. The writings of the prolific but largely forgotten August Winnig (1878–1956) can be used to reconstruct how workerdom came to provide an emotional blueprint, an identificatory model, and a compensatory fantasy in the reimagining of class, folk, and nation. The influential Vom Proletariat zum Arbeitertum (1930), as well as select autobiographical and fictional works by Winnig, are used to uncover these continuities through the political emotions, dispositions, and identifications that can properly be called populist. In the larger context of worker’s literature, conservative revolution, and völkisch thought, the Nazi discourse of workerdom not only confirms the close connection between political emotion and populist (un)reason but also opens up new ways to understand the continued attractions of populism as a particular kind of politics of emotion based on the dream of the people.