The place of emotions in political behaviour: between political psychology and constructivism

In this paper I will show the main progress with respect to the paper presented in this same panel at the 48th ECPR Joint Sessions (2020). In last year paper we presented my thesis project, which fits in two lines of work that have been developed by the Political Research Team (EIP) of the USC, and its two objectives: i. to analyse how much emotions weigh in the explanation of vote, and ii. to investigate what neuroscience can contribute to research on the construction of political decisions. Unfortunately, the second of the initially proposed objectives is at an uncertain point. Due to the complicated situation, we have been experiencing since last year, some of the research projects have been affected and we have not made any progress in this direction. However, over the last few months we have considered a new approach to try to understand the place of emotions in political life, which we will briefly present in the first sections of this paper. Consequently, the objective of my thesis has taken a turn: emotions will no longer be treated as independent variables, but rather we will try to identify the elements that shape the process of political construction of emotions. For this purpose, we will make an exhaustive bibliographical review of previous contributions to the constructivist approach of emotions , and we will try to go a step further and bring constructivism closer to a more empirical approach. We will try to achieve this main objective through Structural Equations Models (SEM) analysis. In this paper, we will present two SEM in order to show the benefits of this technique and explain how SEM has been used by the EIP to analyse the weight of emotions in the explanation of vote. We will then show how SEM can help us move towards a more comprehensive understanding compared to other statistical methods by allowing us to measure both the direct effect of the independent variables on the phenomenon to be explained and the relationships between the independent variables (indirect effects).