Project POLEMIC

What role do emotions play in politics? Politicians use emotions to appeal to the electorate. How emotional are these appeals, and is there, as is often suggested, a trend towards more negative emotional appeals? Additionally, what emotions do voters feel when they hear these emotional appeals, and are they persuaded by them? Following a series of surprising electoral results in 2016, project POLEMIC places emotions at the center of political analysis by using new methods and reconceptualizing theories of emotions.

Start of the project

Our project ran from 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2024. POLEMIC received a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Grant agreement No. 759079).

Goal of the project

Do modern politicians use more emotional appeals to citizens than in the past? Do these emotional speeches work to change the politics of a society? And what type of emotional appeals are most effective? We systematically track the tone in speeches in nine different parliaments over 30 years. Additionally, we conduct surveys in the US and The Netherlands. And use automated text analysis to extract emotion from appeals, and physiological measurement to measure emotions. This enables us to understand the impact of emotional expressions and tones on political evaluations. Project POLEMIC offers a unique combination of studying both the politician’s message and the citizen’s reaction, bridging the gap between political science and psychology. Ultimately, POLEMIC will shed light on the role of emotions in political decision-making.

Current status

We’ve completed our research.

Results

There’s no need for alarm over emotions in politics because there’s no clear trend towards negativity. Our results indicate that while tone and facial expressions influence people, their impact is modest compared to agreement with a politician on substantive issues. The effects of the tone and facial expressions of politicians on people are modest. However, a concern is the disconnect between people’s conscious emotional experiences, the labels they use, and the unconscious processes driving their emotions and political behaviors. Banning emotions from politics is unrealistic since affective and cognitive processes are deeply intertwined. The real question is how to harness emotions as a positive force for democracy.

Researchers on this project

Bert Bakker, Gijs Schumacher, Isabella Rebasso, Maaike Homan, Christian Pipal, Diamantis Petropoulos Petalas,
Mariken van der Velden, Matthijs Rooduijn, Neil Fasching, Nicolai Berk, Ruby Dunkes, Delaney Peterson, Sam Wikander,
Babke Weenk, Bennet Hübbe, Christian Ramelow, Mohammad Hamdan, Maartje van de Koppel and Karlijn Hendriks.

Publications on project IP-PAD

Nr.PublicationType
Arceneaux, K., Bakker, B. N., & Schumacher, G. (in-press). Being of One Mind: Does Alignment in Physiological Responses and Subjective Experiences Shape Political Ideology? Political Psychology.
Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., Gothreau, C., & Arceneaux, K. (2020). Conservatives and liberals have similar physiological responses to threats. Nature Human Behaviour, 4 (6), 613–621.
Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., & Homan, M. D. (2020). Yikes! Are we disgusted by politicians? Politics and the Life Sciences, 39 (2), 135–153.
Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., & Rooduijn, M. (2021). Hot Politics? Affective Responses to Political Rhetoric. American Political Science Review, 115 (1), 150–164.
Gillissen, M., Rooduijn, M., & Schumacher, G. (2024). Empathic Concern and Perspective-Taking have opposite effects on affective polarization. Journal of Experimental Political Science.
Homan, M. D. (2024). Citizens’ affective, cognitive and behavioral responses to the emotional displays of politicians. Dissertation University of Amsterdam.
Homan, M. D., Hamdan, M., Hendriks, K., & Petropoulus Petalas, D. (2024). Neural Responses to Emotional Displays by Politicians: Differential Mu and Alpha Suppression Patterns in Response to In-Party and Out-PartyLeaders.
Homan, M. D., & Schumacher, G. (2023). Examining the Influence of Politicians’ Emotional Appeals on Vote Choice using a Visualized Leader Choice Task. PsyArXiv.
Homan, M. D., Schumacher, G., & Bakker, B. N. (2023). Facing Emotional Politicians: Do Emotional Displays of Politicians Evoke Mimicry and Emotional Contagion? Emotion.
Petropoulos Petalas, D., Bakker, B. N., & Schumacher, G. (2022). Neural Correlates of Ideological Cognition During Probabilistic Inference.
Petropoulos Petalas, D., Schumacher, G., & Scholte, S. (in-press). Is Political Ideology Correlated with Brain Structure? A Preregistered Replication. iScience.
Pipal, C. (2024a). Blueprints and fingerprints. Politicians’ use of emotional appeals in European democracies. Dissertation University of Amsterdam.
Pipal, C. (2024b). Sentitopics [R-Package].
Pipal, C., Bakker, B. N., Schumacher, G., & van der Velden, M. A. C. G. (2024). Tone in politics is not systematically related to macro trends, ideology, or experience. Scientific Reports.
Pipal, C., Schoonvelde, M., & Schumacher, G. (2024). Taking Context Seriously: Joint Estimation of Sentiment and Topics in Textual Data. PsyArXiv.
Rebasso, I. (2023). Feeling Within Reason: How Appraisals Shape Emotional Responses to Politics. Dissertation University of Amsterdam.
Schumacher, G., Homan, M. D., Rebasso, I., Fasching, N., Bakker, B. N., & Rooduijn, M. (2024).Establishing the validity and robustness of facial electromyography measures for political science. Politics and the Life Sciences, 1–18.
Schumacher, G., Rooduijn, M., & Bakker, B. N. (2022). Hot Populism? Affective Responses to Antiestablishment Rhetoric. Political Psychology, 43 (5).

Other projects from Hot Politics Lab

Project Under Pressure

In this project we study how people perceive and regulate threats and adopt political attitudes and behaviours to counter these threats.

Project OnderbuikNL

In the summer of 2016, during the annual three-day Lowlands festival (music and performing arts festival), Hot Politics Lab conducted experiments measuring physiological responses to political propaganda.