Rationality of Emotions: The Role of Incidental Emotions in Making Political Decisions

In the last 20 years, political science has made progress in understanding the meaning and role of emotions in complex political processes. This proto-inclusion of emotions in the research programs of political science was considered as an affective revolution or as an emotional turn. The topic of the paper I propose is the impact of emotions on the decision-making process in political domains of assessments of probability and risk, political compromise and negotiation, securitization and political preferences and attitudes. The empirical study will be based on the assumption that the role of emotions in the political decision-making process is relevant to the extent that, when particular emotions are induced, the behavior of the decision makers tends to diverge from the premises of the rational choice theory and prospect theory. In terms of the methodological research approach, the research will be based on experimental research design in the "agent-centered” environment of methodological individualism and cognitive theory of emotions. Despite the affective revolution, the most dominant and established models for explaining decision-making process in political science are still rational choice theory and prospect theory. On the other hand, the model that involves emotion-based decision-making has not yet been tested in detail empirically, especially when it comes to political decisions. This study attempts to fill that scientific gap and to insightfully penetrate in the interplay of emotions and various aspects of rationality of political decision-making process. The aim of the study is to find out what the difference is when a political decision-maker makes a decision in a sad, happy, scared, angry or neutral mood. Experimental design will imply a classical experiment in laboratory conditions. A total of 200 subjects will participate in the experiment, divided into 5 groups, which means a total of 40 respondents by emotional state. The respondents will be students of the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade. The first step in inducing emotional states (MIPs) will be to expose respondents to carefully selected videos tailored to fit each emotion. After inducing emotions, the participants in the experiment will fill out a questionnaire. At the beginning of the questionnaire, there will be the scales for detecting the type of emotional reaction (self-assessment manikin) of the respondents. This will be accompanied by an instrument that answer the following research questions: (a) How emotions affect the assessment of probability for future political events; (b) How emotions affect the propensity to assess risk for certain political events; (c) How emotions affect the attitude towards political compromise and negotiation; (c) How emotions affect the attitude towards securitization and adoption of political measures to "neutralize" security problems; (d) How emotions affect political preferences and attitudes.