Social Sharing of Emotions in Populist Online Communication

• In Event: 3262 - Current Trends in the Sociology of Emotions

Abstract

Anger and fear are frequently considered as driving forces of populist party support, since their corresponding appraisal structures resonate with characteristics of populist ideologies. This contribution examines the presence and diffusion of these emotions in populist online communications to gain insights into the formation of intergroup emotions. The study applies a lexical sentiment analysis of discrete emotions to a sample of 275.582 Twitter posts authored by officials of two German political parties frequently characterized as populist, the left-wing “Die Linke” and the right-wing “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD), and to a baseline sample of 315,536 random posts. Using multilevel regression models, the study compares the presence of anger and fear cues across groups and analyzes associations between these cues and linguistic references to migrants and political elites. Also, the effect of expressed anger on the frequency by which posts are shared by their recipients is modeled. Results support the hypotheses that anger, and to a lesser extent fear, are dominant emotions in populist communications on Twitter, and that populists are more likely to evoke anger when referring to out-groups. Finally, the study shows that anger cues significantly increase the sharing of posts authored by populist actors. Since social sharing of emotions is thought to contribute to emotional alignment processes within groups and consequently to the strengthening of group identities, these findings do not only depict a strong resonance of emotionalized populist messages promoting out-group devaluation but also hint at their potential to foster in-group cohesion within populist online-collectives.

Author

• Philipp Wunderlich, Freie Universität Berlin