Emotions and Populism: insights from the Italian case in comparative perspective

Although populism and its striking recent success have been the subject of many academic studies, however, most of them concentrate on the structural economic, political and cultural causes of the phenomenon, partly neglecting the important role of emotions. Yet, emotions are part of our (political) day life and they are prevalent in the rhetoric of populist politicians and movements. This paper, bridging social movement studies and populism literature, aims to yield insights into the nexus between emotions and populism using as case study Italy in the last two decades. We perform a Sentiment Analysis on Italian party manifestoes and leaders’ speeches since the early 2000s up to the last 2018 national elections. Using automated tools for text analysis and drawing on Machine Learning techniques, we empirically explore the emotions (i.e. anger, dis-trust, hate, hope, joy) and the connected sentiments recurrent in the narrative of populist parties, distinguishing across varieties of populism (left-wing or hybrid and right-wing). We interpret the results under a comparative European perspective against original survey data (SWG-Cratesis) collected on populist voters in Italy and other European countries after the last 2019 European elections. This study entails important implications for the research on emotional appeals in politics and populist communication.