Emotions and Political Behavior under Authoritarianism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Emotions, especially with respect to the effects of discrete emotions, have been extensively studied in the public opinion literature during the last two decades. It has been documented that certain emotions, such as fear, anger, and enthusiasm, affect information search, opinion formation, and taking risky or costly political decisions. However, these studies have been mostly limited to democratic polities, and interest in political emotions under authoritarian conditions have stayed limited. Authoritarian regimes have predominantly been described as de-mobilizing regimes, and authoritarian propaganda has been understood as primarily a tool of projecting power, rather than evoking genuine emotions.

We believe that more focus on affective politics is necessary to better understand patterns of public opinion and behaviour under contemporary authoritarian regimes. First, most forms of mass political behaviour in authoritarian regimes fall under the category of risky or costly behaviour. By definition, authoritarian regimes do not provide institutional guarantees to freely express political views, organize, or protest. The mobilizing or demobilizing power of emotions become especially relevant here. Second, authoritarian countries are characterized by unequal access to media environment as most of the media organizations are under the government control. This gives authoritarian governments a unique advantage to manipulate the affective landscape in the country through concerted and intensive use of authoritarian propaganda. It is still an open question, however, whether authoritarian governments really try to evoke emotional reactions and whether they can be successful in this when they try it.

This panel brings together four papers that explore the role of emotions under authoritarian regimes. The selection presents a wide range of diversity in terms of cases and methodologies, while talking to each other in terms of their research questions. Russia, China, Turkey, and Palestinian Authority are cases covered in this panel. Emotions, the key variable of interest, is measured through self-reported survey questions, the analysis of vocal pitch in propaganda videos, and forms of text analysis. The research questions, on the other hand, revolve around the issue of authoritarian regime support.

Robertson et al. and Dornschneider both explore how political emotions mediate the relationship between regime repression and mass behavior. Through a survey experiment conducted in Russia, Robertson et al. unpack the different individual reactions to repression and investigate their implications for subsequent attitudes and behavior. In addition to demonstrating that repression can lead to both fear and anger with diverging implications, they also explore how repression is linked to perceptions of legitimacy for the regime. Dornschneider, on the other hand, investigates emotions of anger and fear, as well as overall negativity and positivity, through interview transcripts of residents living in Palestine. The findings show that the transcripts display both emotions of fear and anger, with fear levels exceeding anger levels. The paper moreover conducts a comparative analysis, comparing the interview transcripts to Facebook entries from during the Arab Spring and speech data from Palestinian leaders.

Ozturk and Chen et al. primarily focus on regime propaganda and authoritarian regimes' efforts to evoke emotional reactions from citizens. Ozturk traces widespread economic misperceptions among regime supporters in Turkey back to narratives and symbols used by the regime. By combining observational and experimental data at the individual level, he argues that the regime’s economic narratives have an emotional structure, and this emotional structure is instrumental to both improve economic expectations and create charismatic attachments to the authoritarian leader. Chen et al., on the other hand, focus on documenting the emotional propaganda used by the Chinese regime. In addition to exploring when and how the regime adopts emotional propaganda, they also develop audio-as-data approach, which will be useful to study the emotional content of regime propaganda through audio recordings.

Discussants of this panel are Lauren Young (UC Davis) and Katerina Tertytchnaya (University College London). Lauren Young`s research agenda focuses especially on exploring decision-making under the threat of violence. She has conducted research in Zimbabwe, Eastern Europe, Haiti, and Mexico. Katerina Tertytchnaya studies authoritarian propaganda, nonviolent repression, and protest, with a focus on post-Soviet geography. The panel will be chaired by Shana Gadarian (Syracuse University), a scholar of political psychology, who has conducted extensive research on the effect of emotions on opinion formation.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Repression, Emotions and Legitimacy: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Russia - Graeme Robertson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University; Bryn Rosenfeld, Cornell University; Samuel A. Greene, King's College London

• Why Men Don’t Rebel: Anger, Fear, and Affective Valence in the West Bank - Stephanie Dornschneider, University College Dublin

• Narrative and Affective Origins of Misperceptions under Authoritarianism - Aykut Ozturk, University of Glasgow

• Understanding Emotional Propaganda in China with an Audio-as-Data Approach - Haohan Chen, New York University; Yiqiang Wang, The University of Hong Kong; Tony Zirui Yang, Washington University in St. Louis

Chair

• Shana Kushner Gadarian Syracuse University

Discussants

• Lauren E Young University of California, Davis

• Katerina Tertytchnaya University College London