I Don’t Talk About Politics: Manufacturing Consent with Emotional Regulation

• In Event: Politics, Social Movements, and Emotions

Abstract

How do people navigate political emotions amid the mainstreaming of the far-right? While research on hegemony emphasizes ideological consent and scholarship on affective polarization documents growing partisan hostility, we know less about how everyday people regulate their political emotions in contexts of uneven power and authoritarian drift. Bringing Gramscian theories of common sense into conversation with the sociology of emotions, this paper examines how emotional regulation sustains political order in the United States and France. Drawing on nationally representative surveys, digital diaries, and in-depth interviews collected between 2025 and 2026, we analyze how respondents manage fear, anger, alienation, and moral conflict in their everyday lives. Across political orientations and national contexts, individuals limit political expression through self-surveillance, withdrawal from social media, strategic silence, and the moralization of calmness. We identify three key mechanisms: avoiding painful emotions, preserving relationships, and pathologizing dissent. Rather than escalating conflict, many respondents minimize overt contestation to protect family unity, workplace credibility, and social belonging. We argue that hegemony operates not only through ideological agreement but through emotional regulation, which normalizes restraint and reframes conflict as deviance. Emotional discipline stabilizes political order by absorbing dissent into practices of civility, enabling authoritarian shifts to coexist with the appearance of pluralism and choice.

Authors

• Lauren Clingan, Sciences Po

• Jen Schradie, Sciences Po - Paris