How emotional are populists really? : factors explaining emotional appeals in the communication of political parties

Abstract

Are populists really more emotional than mainstream parties? The alleged link between populism and emotional communication has barely been subject to systematic empirical scrutiny. I use literature on populist communication and appraisal theory to generate expectations about which political parties use which emotional appeals. I test these claims by applying a novel emotional dictionary to a large set of text data including more than 700,000 press releases and tweets from three European countries. As expected, I find that populist parties use significantly more negative emotional appeals (anger, fear, disgust, sadness) and less positive emotional appeals (joy, enthusiasm, pride, hope) than mainstream parties. Furthermore, I find that political actors adapt the usage of emotional appeals to different purposes depending on the communication medium and the politicians' status level. This study entails important implications for the research on emotional appeals in politics and populist communication.