Fuming mad or jumping with joy? Emotional responses to uncivil communication, post-truth and crisis

The antagonistic discourse and lack of communicative truthfulness have become prominent aspects of contemporary politics in many European countries. The populist rhetoric dividing society between "us" and "them", attacks toward opposing politicians, and incivility in elite communication have become especially salient given an increase in political polarization during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Such communication can be accelerated by social media, which gives the politicians an unmediated access to the people with similar views and positions. Extant research has brought important insights into politicians’ public engagement on social media and the effects of hostile politics on people's attitudes, showing how populist rhetoric using negative, provocative, and conflictive messages fuels strong reactions like love or anger. However, less work has been done on emotional reactions caused by polarized political communication and uncivil rhetoric in particular. This study focuses on the effects of incivility and post-truth accusations in political leaders' social media communication on emotional reactions of users responding to those posts during a crisis. Building upon concepts from populist communication and polarization, we go beyond studying the quantity of responses to elite discourse and investigate the content and contextual characteristics which affect more qualitative reactions of social media users. To do so, we analyse the communication of Czech political party leaders on Facebook during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Czech Republic makes a good case as the country went from “best in Covid”, as declared by then Prime minister Andrej Babiš in summer 2020, to the most recorded COVID-19 cases per capita in the world by autumn 2021. Though the government introduced strict measures in the beginning of the pandemic, it was still criticized for their poor crisis management. The handling of the crisis was later affected by inconsistent communication, upcoming regional elections and as a consequence, delayed and chaotic measures, as well as declining public willingness to comply combined with demands for a return to “normal life”. Applying manual claims analysis to study the leaders' public communication between March 2020 and March 2021 (2549 posts), we expect that the use of uncivil language and the presence of truth evaluations in the Facebook posts will increase the number of emotional responses of social media users. We also expect that emotional reactions will be more pronounced under populist (vs. non-populist) posts and will also differ over the course of the crisis. In particular, the different pandemic waves and pandemic topics emphasized by politicians in their posts will affect the emotional responses differently. The article has important implications for the study of how negativity, incivility and attacks on truthfulness in elite communication may help delegitimise political opponents as well as increase societal polarization and public distrust towards democratic institutions.