Emotional dynamics of grievances in blame politics

Abstract

This panel seeks to examine the emotional dynamics (e.g., emotion sharing, amplification, coordination, regulation, management) that underpin mechanisms associated with grievances and blaming in politics. As a result of multiple crises that have hit Europe during the past decade there a rising public anxiety about the threat of poverty, social exclusion, and the loss of a sense of progress, safety, justice, and security which provides a fertile ground for vengeful political claims. Previous studies highlighted that grievances emerge from experienced and perceived injustice, deprivation of opportunity, or lack of political efficacy and are felt as emotions such as shame, humiliation, envy, inefficacious anger, resentment, and indignation, and that identifying oneself or one´s group as a victim is characteristic of grievance politics. Our knowledge is however particularly incomplete regarding the dynamic interrelationships between emotions, identities, values and communication, and the way they contribute to the diffusion of blame politics and collective grievances. The panel employs a cross-disciplinary approach to unpack if and how certain individual complaints become group dissatisfaction and be a part of collective grievances in political struggles. We invite contributions to map out social networking platforms, legacy media discourses, and immersive VR media to identify the manifestation of the emotional components in blame assignment processes and public debates over policy failures. The panel also discusses the challenges of assessing the emotional complexity of political grievances. For instance, moral denunciation and publicly manifested rage over injustice drive both progressive and reactionary visions, one may argue that it is not the presence nor absence of grievances in itself, but the prosocial and pro-democratic natures of such practices that should be examined. Therefore, we call for empirical investigations and theoretically-driven contributions aiming to understand the strategies of grievance-based political movements and their ways of supporting the precarious identities of their members. We look for submissions methodologically innovative that can expand our knowledge on grievances and blame politics in the context of political campaigns, and policy debates, for example, on migration, minority rights incl. gender/LGBTQA+, social security, and specific cases such as Brexit, the war in Ukraine, climate change and pandemic-related issues. The panel equally welcomes comparative analysis and single case studies, qualitative and quantitative investigations.

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