Beyond Strategy: How Politicians’ Emotions Shape Responsiveness to Citizens

Information about citizens’ preferences reaches politicians in many different forms. Citizens write e-mails to politicians, take to the streets to protest, have interest groups voice their concerns, express their views in opinion polls covered by the mass media, react and post on social media, etc. All these ‘public opinion signals’ teach politicians something about what (a segment of) the public wants. Vast literatures in political science are devoted to examining under what circumstances politicians are more likely to be responsive to each of these signals (for literature reviews see e.g. Amenta et al., 2010 on social movement signals; Costa, 2017 on citizen-initiated contacts; Dekker & Bekkers, 2015 on social media signals; or Wlezien & Soroka, 2016 on general public opinion signals). These literatures predominantly characterize politicians as purposive actors whose decisions are best understood as an outcome of their cognitive (strategic) considerations. The tendency to focus on what politicians think (rather than on what they feel) can be traced back to foundational studies portraying them as “utility maximizers” (Downs, 1957) and it reverberates in much of the research to this date. For example, representation studies argue that politicians are “strategically (un)responsive” to citizens (Soontjens, 2022, p. 731) in “rational anticipation” of the electoral consequences thereof (Franchino et al., 2022, p. 42). This description of politicians is at odds with how political scientists characterize the political behavior of ‘ordinary’ people. Inspired by insights from (political) psychology and neuroscience, scholars in this field realized decades ago that citizens’ political behavior (such as who they vote for, whether they participate politically, what information they consult, …) is strongly influenced by their emotions (see e.g. Gadarian & Brader, 2023; Webster & Albertson, 2022). Human decision-making happens against a background of emotions, this literature argues, and accounting for these emotions has proven essential to understanding people’s decisions and behavior. And aren’t politicians human, too? From a psychological perspective, there is little doubt that what politicians feel about diverse public opinion signals matters, regardless of any cognitive or strategic reasons they may have. In theories of political representation, however, this has largely been overlooked. Our paper addresses this gap by theorizing politicians’ emotional experiences as drivers of their (non-)responsiveness to citizens. We substantiate our arguments with data from interviews with Belgian and Swiss parliamentarians (n = 220) conducted in 2025. We probed the politicians to recall the last time they felt genuinely angry / anxious / enthusiastic in the work context, and, more specifically, in response to something a voter said or did. We then asked them to tell us in detail about what made them feel this way, and how they reacted. This process-tracing approach allows us to explore the diverse factors that elicit different types of emotions in politicians (the causes) and the effects this has on their decision (not) to act responsively (the consequences)—from the perspective of the politicians themselves. Doing so, we aim to set a research agenda for the study of politicians’ emotions as drivers of their responsive representative behavior.