Can Emotions Explain How Securitization Rhetoric Shapes Policy Preferences?

• In Event: How Do You Feel about That? The Role of Emotion in Politics

Abstract

Using securitization rhetoric is one option political actors can use to push citizens’ attitudes and support them. The underlying mechanism of this effect remains unclear. We argue that the framing of the message evokes different emotions within the receiver, which mediates the support for policies on the freedom-security nexus. Anxiety would turn policy preferences towards security based on the locus of control, while anger enhances freedom preferences. We conduct a survey experiment with treatments based on actual newspaper articles about migration in times of an international health crisis. The emotion mediator is operationalized in two ways: first, an objective measurement stemming from automated sentiment analysis, and second, a perceived measure based on large-scale human coding. The results support the expectations and highlight the relevance of emotions as a mediator. This paper contributes to the in-depth understanding of how the trend of securitization impacts democratic preferences by European citizens. We extend existing knowledge by investigating the mediating effect of emotions. Relying on human coders, we surpass problems of automated text analysis on emotions and combine the advantages of both methods.

Authors

• Felix Jäger, University of Mannheim

• Sandra Morgenstern, University of Mannheim