Emotive Communication during Election Campaigns: Comparing party-specific preferences in different countries

In keeping with the general trend of greater interest in emotion as a component of political psychology (Reynolds 2018), the emotional content of political messaging has received increased attention in recent years, spurred in part by greater opportunities for unmediated mass communication with the public through online media. This is significant, because political actors have long shown their capacity to deploy emotion in a strategic way (e.g. Hall and Ross 2015) and prior research has established that at least some emotive content has the potential to attract attention and shift opinion among members of the public (e.g. Gerstlé and Nai 2019). Specific emotions are linked both with ideological preferences (e.g. Aarøe, Petersen, and Arceneaux 2017, 2020; Kettle and Salerno, 2017) and preferences for continuity or change (e.g. Field, 2020). However, the use of emotive communication during elections has remained somewhat understudied outside of North America (particularly the US), and comparative studies are particularly limited (Weber 2018). This restricts the generalisability of findings within the bounds of geography, language, political culture, and electoral systems. While the study of emotion as a factor in political outlook and public opinion has become more popular in European case studies (e.g. Bakker et al., 2021; Vasilopoulou and Wagner 2017; Vasilopoulos 2018), the emotional content of actual online political rhetoric during election campaigns—compared to, say, the ‘felt states’ of survey respondents or study participants—remains underused as a data source. As part of a wider research programme examining this phenomenon in the European context, this paper explores the emotive styles used by political parties during the ‘short campaigns’ of recent general parliamentary elections in three European countries: the United Kingdom (2019), Ireland (2020), and Iceland (2021). Primary data are sourced from the online messages produced by each party, forming a novel dataset of Facebook posts from official party accounts (n = 4,155). Quantitative text analysis is used to determine the emotional ‘palette’ employed by each party, and these secondary data are used to test whether parties differ in their emotional strategies along predictable lines, based on each party’s ideological position and power status (government versus opposition). The novelty of using European political communication data adds robustness to the existing body of research on emotional campaigning rhetoric in several important ways. Most obviously, expanding the geographic scope of the literature beyond its typical ‘centre of gravity’ of the US allows for variation in political culture and electoral systems. The dyadic nature of the UK’s first-past-the-post system—the closest in nature to the US—is set in contrast against two different models of proportional representation in Ireland (more candidate-centric) and Iceland (more party-centric). Initial findings in this ongoing study support the previously-established principle that particular parties will favour particular emotive styles; however, the picture is complicated by between-country variations, where the politics of coalition and co-operation fostered by multi-party PR systems offer different challenges to shaping effective emotive messages compared to the more straightforwardly competitive majoritarian environment.