EMPOL. POLITICAL EMOTIONS IN MOTION. CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES
20/06/2021. Research Project grant awarded by the Spanish Minister for Science and innovation (2021-2024) ! Stay tuned!
The EMPOL project (PID2020-113030RB-I00) analyzes the political drivers and consequences of emotions. The two main axes (broad research questions), hence, consider emotions as dependent or independent variables, respectively.
Within the first EMPOL axis, the objectives are 1) to conceptualize and measure emotions in the domain of politics, while providing insight about their traits (e.g. immediacy, stability) and individual correlates (such sociodemographic traits, psychological predispositions, or political attitudes), and 2) to analyze the role of political context in the development of emotions. By assessing these questions, we expect to improve the existing survey emotional measures and to characterize them as specific subjective traits, different from personality dimensions or values. We also aim at overcoming some challenges present in the literature connecting political context and emotions, usually plagued with endogeneity and ecological fallacies.
As for the second axis, EMPOL takes emotions as independent variables for different aspects of political behavior broadly understood, including 1) vote choice, 2) protest participation, 3) political attitudes related to participation (i.e. interest, efficacy, in-group identifications) 4) information processing and 5) political polarization. This research axis tries to fills the following gaps in the existing literature: a) the use of appropriate models, measures and data to estimate the effects of emotions on political behavior phenomena, b) determining who is more sensitive to the (mediating) effect of emotions and c) bringing forth new research objects for which emotions can be consequential. In this respect, the project addresses that usual role of emotions as mediators of political behavior phenomena needs suitable measures, adequate data (panel), accurate model specifications (e.g panel mediation) and the inclusion of potential confounders (personality, political identities), which have seldom been considered. Notably, we will extend this schema to the study of two relatively new research objects: information processing (particularly with regards fake news) and political polarization, a phenomenon that is particularly acute and relatively underresearched in Spain.
To achieve these objectives the project uses different methodological tools. Panel data are used to track within-individual change in the emotions, to assess their immediacy and stability, and to address the relevance of different individual characteristics as explanatory factors. Media content analysis, rolling cross-sectional data and experimental methods are used to analyze the role of context in triggering emotional reactions as well as emotions’ ultimate political consequences of emotions for citizen’s political attitudes and behaviors.
The project will make the following contributions to our existing knowledge of emotions in politics : 1) problematizing (and provide solutions) for their measure in survey contexts 2) understanding how different are emotions from other stable psychological traits 3) determining its stability and, thus, exogeneity -which is useful when using them as predictors 4) unravelling when, how and under what conditions emotions emerge as a result of a political event, 5) improving the modelling of emotional effects in political behavior studies, 6) determining their role for (mis)information processing and 7) disentangling them from affective polarization and identifying a causal path between both phenomena.
The expected outcomes aimed at advancing our knowledge about emotions in the domains of political and social sciences include no less than ten published papers in indexed journals, three defended dissertations, several networking and dissemination activities and a monography. We expect this production to inform policymakers and media gatekeepers about emotions as inputs and outputs of their professional activity.
Within the first EMPOL axis, the objectives are 1) to conceptualize and measure emotions in the domain of politics, while providing insight about their traits (e.g. immediacy, stability) and individual correlates (such sociodemographic traits, psychological predispositions, or political attitudes), and 2) to analyze the role of political context in the development of emotions. By assessing these questions, we expect to improve the existing survey emotional measures and to characterize them as specific subjective traits, different from personality dimensions or values. We also aim at overcoming some challenges present in the literature connecting political context and emotions, usually plagued with endogeneity and ecological fallacies.
As for the second axis, EMPOL takes emotions as independent variables for different aspects of political behavior broadly understood, including 1) vote choice, 2) protest participation, 3) political attitudes related to participation (i.e. interest, efficacy, in-group identifications) 4) information processing and 5) political polarization. This research axis tries to fills the following gaps in the existing literature: a) the use of appropriate models, measures and data to estimate the effects of emotions on political behavior phenomena, b) determining who is more sensitive to the (mediating) effect of emotions and c) bringing forth new research objects for which emotions can be consequential. In this respect, the project addresses that usual role of emotions as mediators of political behavior phenomena needs suitable measures, adequate data (panel), accurate model specifications (e.g panel mediation) and the inclusion of potential confounders (personality, political identities), which have seldom been considered. Notably, we will extend this schema to the study of two relatively new research objects: information processing (particularly with regards fake news) and political polarization, a phenomenon that is particularly acute and relatively underresearched in Spain.
To achieve these objectives the project uses different methodological tools. Panel data are used to track within-individual change in the emotions, to assess their immediacy and stability, and to address the relevance of different individual characteristics as explanatory factors. Media content analysis, rolling cross-sectional data and experimental methods are used to analyze the role of context in triggering emotional reactions as well as emotions’ ultimate political consequences of emotions for citizen’s political attitudes and behaviors.
The project will make the following contributions to our existing knowledge of emotions in politics : 1) problematizing (and provide solutions) for their measure in survey contexts 2) understanding how different are emotions from other stable psychological traits 3) determining its stability and, thus, exogeneity -which is useful when using them as predictors 4) unravelling when, how and under what conditions emotions emerge as a result of a political event, 5) improving the modelling of emotional effects in political behavior studies, 6) determining their role for (mis)information processing and 7) disentangling them from affective polarization and identifying a causal path between both phenomena.
The expected outcomes aimed at advancing our knowledge about emotions in the domains of political and social sciences include no less than ten published papers in indexed journals, three defended dissertations, several networking and dissemination activities and a monography. We expect this production to inform policymakers and media gatekeepers about emotions as inputs and outputs of their professional activity.
