Affective Lobbying: How Emotional Appeals Shape Interest Group Influence

Research on interest groups has long been grounded in a rationalist paradigm that conceptualises lobbying as the exchange of informational resources between lobbyists and policymakers. This perspective, however, overlooks a central dimension of political advocacy: emotions. Drawing on insights from political communication and political psychology, we argue that affective lobbying constitutes a distinct mechanism through which interest groups can exert political influence. We distinguish between negative emotional appeals – including fear and anger – which operate through a logic of blame avoidance, and positive emotions – such as empathy and hope – which operate through a logic of credit claiming. We examine lobbying influence at the agenda-setting stage of the policy process, focusing on how affective lobbying enables interest groups to shape the priority status of policy issues. We test these arguments using two waves of original survey data from 294 EU-level interest groups, combined with a systematic content analysis of 45 European Commission policy agenda documents. The results show that positive emotional appeals exert independent effects alongside traditional rational information exchanges, such as evidence and expertise, whereas negative emotional appeals do not. Our findings challenge the presumed negativity bias and dominance of negative emotions in much political communication research, and instead show that positivity is more effective in generating lobbying influence.