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Future Directions for Political Communication Scholarship

Considering Emotion in Mediated Public Participation

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

(Alexander Hamilton, cited in Holmes, 1995, p. 1)

This chapter argues that a key direction for the future of media studies centers on more careful and sustained consideration of the affective elements of communication. In particular, it explores the consequences of the “emotional deficit in political communication” (Richards, 2004), arguing that the neglect of emotion in political communication research reflects a broader blind spot or “epistemological deficit” (Benhabib, 1992) in thinking about political philosophy and democratic practice. To address this epistemological deficit we need a differentiated analysis of political emotions and their role in mobilizing and shaping the ways in which citizens participate in politics. Such an analysis may uncover the kinds of work done by different emotions and emotional appeals in political life. Further, it may show us how existing and emerging media forms and genres encourage particular emotional regimes and discourage others, with tangible political consequences.

Dominant ways of explaining why and how people participate politically draw on premises of liberal democratic theory, which imply that, ideally, participation should be based on rational, impartial, and dispassionate citizenship, to the exclusion of emotional engagement. However, over the past few decades, scholars from a variety of fields have begun to query these assumptions, on the basis of empirical evidence that suggests an emotional engagement in politics: people participate because they care or feel passionately about an issue, and conversely, the choice of inaction also comes about as a result of affective responses (Berlant, 2007; Dahlgren, 2009; cf. Gould, 2010, p. 32). As Thompson and Hoggett (2001) put it, the “point is that wishing the emotions were not there will not make them go away; they will be present in deliberative forums whether or not they are officially excluded” (p. 353). Political participation appears to be driven in large part by impulses that run counter to ideals of liberal democracy. Instead of being driven by rationality, citizens who participate appear to be fueled by passion and emotions ranging from love to hatred, and encompassing disgust, fear, compassion, and care. Scholars who have recognized the role of emotion in politics have reflected on the rise of “passionate politics,” “the politics of affect” (e.g., Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001), and the “emotional public sphere” (e.g., Lunt & Pantti, 2007), to mention just a few labels reflecting an increased awareness of how citizen participation is shaped by emotion.

Some have argued that the focus on the ideal of the dispassionate citizen limits our thinking about how we may organize participation and creates a yawning gap between ideal and practice. For example, empirical observations about the increasingly close relationship between politics and popular culture (e.g., van Zoonen, 2005) suggest that rather than a “dumbing down” of public debate, this realignment opens up new forums and opportunities for emotional expression in public that might engage otherwise apathetic audiences (Lunt & Stenner, 2005). To Richards (2004), politics is increasingly experienced through emotional narratives about feelings and relationships “which are constructed around individual politicians as they are around other public figures. [. . .] These narratives are psychologically realistic, which means that they include the anxieties, doubts, conflicts, and dilemmas which are to be found in our everyday emotional lives” (p. 346). Similarly, George Marcus's work (e.g., 2002) on the political psychology of emotion has given rise to the idea of “affective intelligence” as a counter to the dominant rational choice theories of voter behavior.

Certainly the rise of a broader confessional culture which addresses and validates emotions in public has been widely documented. In his polemic against what he sees as a contemporary obsession with airing our dirty laundry in public, Frank Furedi (2004) argues that we “live in a culture that takes emotions very seriously” (p. 1). In a complex historical account, Reddy (2001) has sought to recover the political importance of emotions, suggesting that the “concept of emotions as used in the West is closely associated with the individual's most deeply espoused goals” (p. 114). Nevertheless, the recognition of the centrality of emotions, despite its consequences for the languages of politics, has had relatively limited impact on discussion of normative ideals of citizen participation among scholars, politicians, and media practitioners alike.

The neglect of actually occurring practices is particularly worrying in the face of a long-term decline in conventional measures of public participation, including voting in elections, newspaper readership, and membership in voluntary associations (e.g., Putnam, 2001; see also Blumler & Gurevitch, 1995). The trend toward public disengagement from conventional forms of political participation suggests that we need new theoretical and practical approaches to citizen participation that recognize the complexity of the contemporary political and media environment. At the same time, there has been an “affective turn” (Clough & Halley, 2007) in cultural studies and humanities disciplines, which has spilled over into the social sciences, so that the relationship between political participation and emotion is now theorized by political scientists, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and literary theorists. To social movement scholars, the question of how movements draw on affective engagements has become central (e.g., Goodwin et al., 2001; Staiger, Cvetkovich, & Reynolds, 2010). For example, Thompson and Hoggett (2001) have investigated how “the emotional life of groups” impacts local political life, informed by the recognition that an overly narrow focus on rationality in politics limits an understanding of actually existing forms of participation.

Some of this scholarship draws on the useful and fundamental distinction between affect and emotion. Massumi (2002) has argued that even though the two terms are often used interchangeably (e.g., Thrift, 2008), there are important conceptual reasons to distinguish between the two. As he sees it, affect is best understood as a bodily sensation, a reaction to stimuli characterized by intensity and energy, but without a conscious orientation and interpretation. By contrast, an emotion

Though Massumi describes emotional reactions as personal first and foremost, his distinction has also become an important resource for sociologists and political scientists interested in collective behavior. His distinction is premised on emotion as both interpretation and narrativization of affect, or its placement in the nexus of social relations. This offers a way out of a narrowly individualist understanding of emotion, foregrounding the “fundamental principle that an emotion cannot be seen purely as an internal, individual, and private phenomenon” (Boehner, DePaula, Dorish, & Sengers, 2007, p. 280). Understanding emotion as narrativized and collective further enables us to perceive it as a potentially politiciz ed or politiciz ing interpretation of bodily affect.

Along these lines, I focus on thinking about emotion in the context of mediated public participation, as the socially constructed and hence politicized interpretation of affect. Debates over emotions and their role in mediated public participation, I argue, are anchored in political thought, which has had little to offer in the way of a differentiated understanding of the varied forms of emotional engagement and expression. I hope to provide some new avenues for investigating and taking seriously the dangers and possibilities of emotion in political communication. Specifically, I suggest that instead of automatically viewing all emotional reaction and expression as destructive forces in political life, we need to understand that some forms of political discourse designed to elicit emotional reaction may have integrative possibilities insofar as they can foster empathy and solidarity, while others – ones that foster hatred and intolerance – may contribute to the breakdown of debate.

Emotion and Communication Studies

What is the place of emotion in work on political communication? Even if this field has largely neglected the study of emotion, it is also true that within communication studies more broadly, scholars have long been attentive to affect in the context of audience reactions and behaviors. In particular, perhaps due to the historically close relationship between communication studies and social psychology, emotion is well established on the broader research agenda of those interested in persuasion and media effects. Indeed, the very idea that media content can “affect” us highlights the affective dimension of our attitudes, values, and behaviors. For instance, Robin Nabi (e.g. 2002, 2003) has differentiated between types of emotions, including disgust, fear, and anxiety, and their consequences for behavior and policy preferences. There is now a well-established research tradition at the intersection of cognitive psychology, political science, and communication studies that takes an interest in how emotional responses interact with cognition in the context of political decision-making. As Westen (2007) suggests, this body of work is based on the premise that the “political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a reasoned decision” (p. xv, emphasis in original). Voters, though often well informed and politically aware, think “with their guts” (p. xv). This, in turn, implies that political campaigning ought to be premised on the central place of emotions in electoral decision-making (p. 420).

Along these lines, the crafting and effects of emotional appeals have long been central to the preoccupations of scholars and practitioners interested in political advertising (e.g., Richards, 2004). As early as 1928, the pioneering public relations expert Edward Bernays, writing to proffer advice on what strategies politicians ought to adopt to optimally sway public opinion, examined in detail the role of emotional appeals, suggesting that candidates need to harness “as many of the basic emotions as possible” (Bernays, 2004, p. 119, cited in Grabe & Bucy, 2009, p. 91). Political consultant Tony Schwartz, who crafted the notorious “Daisy ad” for Lyndon B. Johnson's 1968 presidential campaign against Republican contender Barry Goldwater, was explicit about the centrality of emotional appeals in political campaigning. In his book The Responsive Chord, published in 1974, he suggested that messages ought to be crafted not primarily with attention to the information contained within them, but instead with an eye to the emotional response they may generate in the audience, or their ability to strike a “responsive chord.” Zeynep Gürsel's (2009) ethnographic work on photojournalism at a US news magazine relatedly demonstrates that to journalists, the anticipation of audience emotional reactions to stories is at the core of their deliberations over everything from photo selection to layout:

In other words, scholars have long described questions of audience emotional response as inextricably linked to audience engagement, behavior, and participation. Most recently, Betsi Grabe and Eric Bucy (2009) have contributed an innovative approach to the study of electoral campaigning in their study of the visual framing of general election news between 1992 and 2004. Among other things, their work examined emotional expressions of political candidates as evidenced in television newscasts, and demonstrated the importance of political leaders' nonverbal communication of emotion as a resource for voters' information gathering and decision-making.

Scholars also discuss the role of emotion in political communication in the context of its relation to rationality. For example, Ted Brader's (2006) work has looked at the role of emotional appeals in political campaigns. Brader suggested that there is a need for a more careful analysis of emotion in political life, on the basis that “like rationality, emotion is neither good nor bad in itself. It harbors liabilities as well as benefits [. . .] Emotion, like rationality, does not ensure desirable or good outcomes; emotion assists the democratic citizen in self-governance and can facilitate manipulation and error” (pp. 194–195). Brader concluded that the

Overall, there is a well-established research agenda recognizing the power of emotional appeals to sway audience's political attitudes, values, and behavior and motivations to engage politically. However, these insights have often drawn on the individual-level perspectives of psychological approaches and have paid little heed to larger (collective and political) contexts. As a result, they have rarely been accompanied with theorizing about the relationship between the celebration of the ideal of rationality and the reality of affective engagements in motivating and shaping political participation. Here, I argue that we need to both understand and question the opposition between reason and emotion that underlies so much discussion of politics. When we think about what makes good citizens, in normative and practical terms, we must acknowledge a series of empirical facts about political engagement – based on the notion that “politics requires passion, in the sense of intense involvement, even if liberal democratic theory tends to cling to visions of pure rationality” (Dahlgren, 2009, p. 8). If we fail to appreciate the “emotional life of politics” (Madianou, 2005), we also fail to account for the appeal of forms of politics that fall outside liberal conceptions. A reconsideration of the place of emotion in mediated public participation, I suggest, is vital for a variety of reasons. By bridging the gap between normative ideal and practice, we may refine our conceptual frameworks for analyzing mediated public participation. Understanding the role of emotion in politics requires us to draw on a wide variety of conceptual resources from across the humanities and social sciences disciplines.

Liberal Democratic Theory and the Distrust of Emotion

Prevailing theories of liberal democracy are premised on the normative value of “inalienable” individual rights and liberties, institutionalizing the freedom of religious and political expression, as well as guaranteeing free trade and security (cf. Holmes, 1995, p. 14). Such perspectives view the right to vote as the cornerstone of citizens' privileges, and conversely hold that citizens have the responsibility to accumulate knowledge, consider policy options from the point of view of the shared interest, and vote in regular elections (Holden, 1988). The normative and epistemological assumptions of liberal democratic theory have long pervaded accounts and assessments of political engagement and participation, in both face-to-face and mediated environments. Built into the liberal ideal is an idealization of the rational, dispassionate, and informed citizen, coupled with a clear understanding that emotional citizens make for bad subjects. As Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen (2000) put it:

The suspicion of emotional engagement and the celebration of rationality inherent in the liberal democratic framework are linked to the circumstances of its birth. Liberal democracy evolved in part in reaction to the long-standing dominance of the church and absolutist sovereigns (Holmes, 1995) – governance institutions premised on the service of docile subjects bereft of any power to make political decisions. The novel philosophical belief in the rationality of individuals – and hence, their ability to participate in political decision-making – emerged alongside the rise of science. From the beginning, the practice of science was premised on the notion that individuals could understand the world through the systematic application of reason. The rise of ideas of individual rationality gradually chipped away at the supremacy of sovereigns and the church, in part by legitimizing demands for liberty and equality. While the Renaissance and the Enlightenment brought notions of individual reason and the rights of subjects to the forefront of a revolution in political thought, the emergent body of democratic theory also always struggled with the relationship between rationality and passion in terms of understanding the parameters of citizen participation. Thinkers such as Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, and Mill, in spelling out the logic of a liberal state that involved rights and participation for citizens, were informed by a concern about the ability of ordinary people to exercise reason and rationality, and about the centrality of public participation as an assurance of the legitimacy of government.¹

In this respect, there has always been a tension in democratic political thought between the need to involve citizens as rational and constructive participants in the political process and the need to control what are perceived as the irrational passions of the “common people” – as individuals and as a collective. Broadly, the management and control of emotional expression has been central to Western societies. As Norbert Elias argued in his authoritative account, The Civilizing Process, Western civilization has always relied on affect control structures – systematic mechanisms which regulate individual behavior to ensure the smooth functioning of society. In particular, the control of aggression has been one of the key engines of modernity. Elias thus stipulated that when “the power of a central authority grows, if over a larger or smaller area the people are forced to live in peace with each other, the molding of affects and the standards of the drive-economy are very gradually changed” (2000, p. 169). To Elias, no “society can survive without a channeling of individual drives and affects, without a very specific control of individual behavior” (p. 443). His account demonstrates the centrality of emotion in everyday life – and the central importance of controlling its expression.

In this respect, the distinction between the rationality of the public and the irrationality of the crowd has been foundational to political sociology, which has in turn informed thinking about public participation. For example, Gustave Le Bon's book on The Crowd (1960), first published in 1895, captured prevailing anxiety about the place of passion in collective behavior. In Le Bon's analysis, the individual who becomes part of the crowd is ruled by instinctual and unconscious action. An individual in a crowd is controlled by emotions and passions, “induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests” (p. 32). To Le Bon and other thinkers of his era, images of collective behavior such as those summoned up by mobs, crowds, and masses warned of the emotional manipulability of the “common people” as an Achilles heel of democracy. Similarly, Robert Park, one of the leading figures of the Chicago School of Sociology, took an interest in the relationship between social organization and public participation, viewed through the lens of urban sociology. In his doctoral dissertation, The Crowd and the Public (1972), written at the turn of the twentieth century, Park distinguished between the crowd and the public as forms of collectivities. To Park, the public is driven by rationality and reason, the crowd by emotion and impulse (p. 80). He thus argued that only “in the crowd does anarchy in its purest form exist. As members of a public, people are at least controlled by the norms of logic” (p. 81).

The philosopher Karl Popper (1945), in his defense of the principles of liberal democracy, Open Society, written during World War II, explicitly set out the distinction between emotion and reason. To Popper, if

Popper's polarization of reason and emotion ultimately leads to the conclusion that “constructive emotions” are of little utility in political life, and that emotion therefore almost inevitably becomes destructive as it is transformed into violence (cf. Marcus, 2002, p. 6). These ontological premises reveal deep-seated anxieties fundamental to dominant political theory, and explain the normative elevation of rationality and the suppression of emotion. In some respects, liberal political thought is suffused with concern about emotions (Illouz, 2007) and recognizes them as inevitable evils of political and social life. The hands-down identification of emotion as a source of violence and irrationality has meant that it has been constructed as the polar opposite of rationality. Emotional subjects, in this prevailing view, are “bad” subjects insofar as emotion precludes the rationality required for political decision-making.

Through this logic, liberal theory has dug a hole for itself that is very difficult to get out of. If emotions are inevitable but preclude the rational citizenship required by its ideal, how can citizenship be possible? The answer is one that leaves only a qualified and tenuous hope for citizenship: implicit in much of the political thought discussed here is the view that emotions are like forces of nature; they may quickly spiral out of control and therefore, if at all possible, require control, management, and suppression, regardless of their specific nature and direction. While there are good reasons for the elevation of such “affect control” (Elias, 2000), this view leaves no room for the recognition of the positive role of emotion in politics. It is a position that, in turn, has informed scholarly engagement with questions of emotion among scholars interested in mediated public participation as a pillar of democratic societies.

Problematizing Liberal Democracy and the Public Sphere

Meaningful participation of citizens in mediated public debate is seen as central to the successful functioning of democracy. It is through such discussion that publics deliberate on issues that affect them, whether these issues have to do with the broad direction of policy on topics such as welfare and education, the behavior of politicians, or specific matters ranging from local planning permissions and potholes to the military involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. As a cornerstone of liberal democratic theory, governments require the consent of the governed for their legitimacy, and by participating in mediated public discussion, members of the public express consent or its converse (cf. Salmon & Glasser, 1995). In today's mass societies, where political participation is largely channeled through media of mass communication (McNair, 2007), the provision of forums and sites for public participation is central to democracy.

Much of the work that seeks to assess the democratic potential of mediated public participation takes as its vantage point Habermas's notion of the public sphere. The public sphere concept shares key ontological and normative premises with liberal democracy, even if it also departs from it in its more substantive understanding of citizen participation in politics (e.g., Awad, 2010). In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), Habermas offered a historical study of the emergence, flourishing, and decline of the bourgeois public sphere in France, Germany, and Britain during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, alongside the rise of trade capitalism. Members of the bourgeois class organized themselves through discussion in public settings such as coffeehouses and pubs in Britain, literary salons in France, and regular discussion groups or “table societies” in Germany. The bourgeois public sphere relied on print publications, such as pamphlets and newsletters, to facilitate a shared discussion among groups of people in different locales. Citizens organized themselves through the institutions of the public sphere to hold the state accountable for its actions. As such, the public sphere facilitated communication between citizens and the state. The discussion of the public sphere was about matters of common concern, and individual participation was premised on the ability to put aside self-interest and act impartially. In writing about the bourgeois public sphere as an historical, empirical case study, Habermas also articulated a normative ideal for how citizens ought to participate in public life; a vision of how democracies ought to function. Central to this normative ideal is the belief that citizens ought to be actively engaged in holding government accountable through public discussion. The discussion should be rational, open to all those with an interest in the issue, and participants in the discussion should be judged on the merits of their arguments, rather than on their social status. Through this procedure, the process of deliberation would enable participants to consider the situation of the generalized other in a rational fashion, barring issues of personal interest, which are not relevant to the common good. In his articulation of the public sphere ideal, Habermas ultimately implied that emotional expression, appeals, and argument should be barred from the deliberative process to ensure its rationality.

Habermas's tale of the public sphere has been crucial in theorizing public participation through the news media. Though most scholars acknowledge that the public sphere concept is problematic, it also stepped in to fill a dire conceptual void. The notion of the public sphere has been used both in general ways, to refer to the space in which media operate to connect citizens, and in more specific ways, to examine structures of access and the institutional arrangements of mass media.

Habermas has been particularly influential among political communication scholars because his account demonstrates the centrality of news media to democratic societies (see Dahlgren, 1995, pp. 7–8). Today, the notion of the public sphere is a widely used shorthand for the institutions, including media, through which citizens deliberate about the common good to hold government accountable, or the “realm of social life where the exchange of information and views on questions of common concern can take place so that public opinion can be formed” (Dahlgren, 1995, p. 7). While the limitations of the concept are readily recognized and widely debated, it has been used by media and communication scholars as a yardstick against which to assess existing practices of public debate. Ever since the English translation of Structural Transformation in 1989, Anglophone scholars have drawn on the notion of the public sphere to critique mass media arrangements and sites for public participation. Sites of mediated participation analyzed in this way include conventional “old media” forms such as letters to the editor (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2007), audience participation programs (e.g., Livingstone & Lunt, 1994; McNair, Hibberd, & Schlesinger, 2003), the nature of participation in online discussion forums (e.g., Dahlberg, 2001; Friedland, 1996; Papacharissi, 2010) and, more recently, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (Castells, 2008), and user-generated content (Wahl-Jorgensen, Williams, & Wardle, 2010). Some of these sites are the product of media organizations' deliberate and top-down efforts to give their audiences a voice, and are intrinsically tied to the self-understanding of journalism as a profession in the service of the public (see, for example, McNair, 2007, pp. 18–20; Street, 2001, p. 253), while others are emerging grassroots media that have been heralded as emancipatory and democratizing (e.g., Bowman & Willis, 2003). Research on mediated public participation across these forums has largely drawn on the premises of Habermas's model, even if some of it has problematized the inherent emphasis on rationality.

The proliferation of new interactive forums has, if anything, intensified investigation of the nature of mediated public debate. These new forums present an unprecedented set of opportunities for participation, but they also come with their own distinctive limitations. Although much early scholarship in this area represented a “cyberoptimist” perspective, celebrating the perceived democratizing opportunities inherent in new technologies, more recent work has raised serious questions about the consequences of fragmentation and anonymity, which, among other problems, tend to generate a public debate that is less oriented toward civility, consensus, and rationality (e.g., Papacharissi, 2010; Witschge, 2004). The emergence of new participatory sites and forms has caused researchers to increasingly question the liberal framework of rationality and turn to alternatives, including radical democratic perspectives (e.g., Dahlberg & Siapera, 2007; Mouffe, 2005). This newer research seeks to recover the emancipatory potential of public discussion while recognizing the inherently affective, conflicted, and messy nature of debates over the grand questions that concern us all. Recognition of the complexity of contemporary public debate, in turn, has led scholars to raise questions about the feasibility and desirability of an orientation toward consensus and rationality so central to Habermas's model.

In grappling with these questions, scholars with varied interests from within the discipline have sought to further develop and refine Habermas's concept, which in its generality and its articulation within a specific (and distant) historical context necessarily lacks sensitivity to the nuances and varieties of contemporary forums for mediated participation. Much of this work has built on Fraser's (1992) influential critique of Habermas's account. Fraser challenges the notion of a singular, elite public sphere, and suggests instead that we need conceptualizations that recognize the existence – and the normative desirability – of multiple, overlapping public spheres that are sometimes competing, rather than engaging in rational-critical discussion oriented toward a consensus (e.g., Gitlin, 1998; Hauser, 1999; Squires, 2002). In arriving at this conclusion – albeit from a variety of empirical foci and theoretical perspectives – critics of Habermas have acknowledged that competing goals and visions of the common good mean that the ideal of rational discussion may be neither attainable nor desirable in practice.

For example, DeLuca and Peeples's (2002) influential work on the Seattle anti globalization protests sought to challenge the presumptions of rationality inherent in Habermas's model on the basis of contemporary complex media environments. As DeLuca and Peeples (2002) pointed out, Habermas's emphasis on rational-critical debate in face-to-face and written media may have been descriptive of the communication prevailing in a limited historical context. In its “privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus and civility,” they argue, the public sphere concept fails to capture the forms of participation made possible by today's media environment: a “televisual world characterized by image and spectacle” (DeLuca & Peeples, 2002, pp. 125, 129). Networked, electronic media, including television and the Internet, “have fundamentally transformed the media matrix that constitutes our social milieu, producing new forms of social organization and new modes of perception” (p. 131). Instead of the notion of the public sphere, they argued, we need the concept of a “public screen” as a necessary supplement. As a metaphor, the “public screen” “recognizes that most, and the most important, public discussions take place via ‘screens’ – television, computer, and the front page of newspapers” (p. 125). In their analysis of the spectacle produced by the World Trade Organization (WTO) protesters, they suggest that the public screen offers new political opportunities and forms for both hegemonic and dissenting voices. As such, the concept recognizes that the prevailing forms of communication today are visual and spectacular, rather than verbal and rational:

DeLuca and Peeples's concept of “public screen” picks up on observations about how the mediatized environment in which contemporary political discourse takes place privileges the emotional (and the brief, visual, and dramatic) intervention. Even if emotions have always been part and parcel of political life, today's modes of mediation underwrite their expression and foregrounding in public discourse. Though their description reiterates the juxtaposition of rationality and emotion, it also highlights the empirical and normative impossibility of sustaining the Habermasian approach and offers an alternative model, which incorporates prevailing conditions. In this sense, it takes seriously the challenges of rethinking mediated public participation and incorporating affectively grounded practices of citizenship. Their approach is typical of a growing recognition that emotion needs to be taken seriously as a vital and inevitable component of political life and, hence, mediated political participation.

The Impact of Emotions on Political Life

Among the scholarship that has taken seriously the role of emotion in political life, we can crudely distinguish between approaches that view emotion as a negative feature and those that take a more positive view of it. Simply put, when political emotions contribute to the breakdown of political discussion they can be seen as a disruptive force, whereas when they foster empathy and solidarity, they may positively contribute to engagement in public debate.

Among scholars who express worries about the emotional nature of politics, some are concerned about its impact on the “quality” of public debate, while others study how particular emotions are elicited and mobilized in ways that serve to cement existing power relations and justify forms of domination. Evidence suggests that individuals are motivated to act politically on the basis of what are often negative emotions, including anger, fear, hatred, and disgust toward other individuals, groups, or ideas that are discursively marked out as different or “Other.” The public expression of emotions, therefore, can be socially divisive even as it mobilizes and empowers particular groups, and hence in some cases undermines the quality of public debate. For example, Sarah Ahmed (2004) examined the use of the term “disgust” in online debates over September 11. She demonstrated that the public display of this particular term is a common way of creating distance from cultural phenomena, examining how the terms “disgust,” “disgusting,” and “disgusted” were used to express disapproval of the acts of terrorism, but also of some responses to it. She argued that the expression of disgust “generates a community of those who are bound together through the shared condemnation of a disgusting object or event” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 94). Other scholars have explored how public discourse draws heavily on registers of fear to mobilize subjects. Brian Massumi's (1993) edited volume, The Politics of Everyday Fear, examines what he refers to as “ambient fear” – the low-level, constant fear that pervades capitalized social space and is particularly pervasive in media discourses. Corey Robin's (2004) book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, explores the evolution of what he refers to as “political fear” or “a people's felt apprehension of some harm to their collective well-being – the fear of terrorism, panic over crime, anxiety about moral decay – or the intimidation wielded over men and women by governments or groups” (p. 2). Although fear may be seen to generate unity and energy, Robin (2004) suggests that it is more helpful to view it as “a symptom of pervasive conflict and political unhappiness” (p. 3). An emphasis on fear, he ultimately suggests, creates divisions among groups in diverse societies and forecloses the possibility of a political culture that emphasizes freedom and rationality. As a result, fear can never be a meaningful foundation for democratic politics.

Further, critics have highlighted how even ostensibly positive emotions, including compassion and toleration, are frequently linked to discursive regimes that reinforce the power of dominant groups. Along those lines, Wendy Brown (2006) has suggested that the idea of tolerance has been deployed as a hegemonic resource “discursively depoliticizing the conflicts whose effects it manages by analytically occluding the histories and powers constitutive of these conflicts, and by casting ‘difference’ as ontological and as an inherent site of hostility” (p. 205). Discourses of toleration, insofar as they close down debates, could be seen as practices that cover over more eruptive and dangerous emotions that threaten to destabilize the status quo in their very intensity.

These cautionary voices recognize the mobilizing potential of political emotion, and the power of the energy unleashed by it, but nevertheless suggest that we need to carefully analyze how particular emotions operate in the political field, and ultimately conclude that emotions are frequently destructive forces.

Nonetheless, even ostensibly negative emotions can serve a mobilizing and empowering role. When emotions become collective, they become political. There is nothing straightforward about this process, insofar as “structures of feeling” only gain meaning through socially constructed discourse. Social movements scholars are now interested in how emotions both energize and shape the activities of activists. For example, as Gould (2010) has argued in her analysis of the affective engagements of the feminist and queer movements, political empowerment often takes place through the labeling of emotions – as when lesbians “feeling bad” collectively relabeled their emotion as anger. Indeed, the feminist slogan “the personal is political” speaks precisely to the significance of making public, collective, and hence political the shared but discursively privatized experiences of women, including those of childcare, domestic violence, and housework, which would otherwise be relegated to the private sphere. By naming and articulating as “anger” the negative affect of “feeling bad” about the consequences of patriarchy, it becomes a public and collective emotion that empowers the angry group to take action. As such, social movements “‘make sense’ of inchoate affective states and authorize selected feelings and actions while downplaying and even invalidating others” (Gould, 2010, p. 33). Thus ideologies and discourses both emerge and are sustained through the circulation of affect (Gould, 2010, p.33).

The recognition of the complexity of emotional appeals and responses discussed above is mirrored among scholars who have studied how emotion structures mediated public participation. This work acknowledges that emotional engagement is central to forums for mediated public participation and inevitable both in motivating participants and in shaping their contributions. However, the central role of negative emotion as a mobilizer means that it is the most fervent and angry participants who dominate the debate. Therefore, it does seem that more often than not, where emotions are part of public deliberation, there is little chance of the kind of rational consensus that Habermas and other liberal thinkers envision, and discussion is unlikely to produce mutual understanding.

Research on conventional “old media” forums for mediated public participation, like letters to the editor, demonstrates that the citizens who bother to write or otherwise “participate” are those who feel strongly about particular issues. As discussed above, political participation is often motivated by negative emotions, including intolerance, fear, anger, hatred, and disgust. This makes participatory forums like letters to the editor sites for the airing of views that are more extreme, strongly held, and unchangeable than those of the population as a whole, as established in studies of debates on issues as varied as religion and immigration (Kerr & Moy, 2002, p. 63; Mummery & Rodan, 2003; Mutz, 2004, p. 33). For example, Mummery and Rodan (2003) suggested that Australian letter-writing debates around refugees and asylum seekers were highly polarized and inflammatory, emphasizing and exacerbating difference and intolerance rather than seeking to overcome them. Scholars generally agree that some of the ideas expressed in letters are not actually intended to invite dialogue or debate but to perpetuate intolerant views, whether they pertain to refugees (Mummery & Rodan, 2003), ethnic minorities (Richardson, 2001; Richardson & Franklin, 2003), or cultural diversity more generally (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004). Such contributions, given their intractable positions, may close off a debate, rather than providing the conditions that nurture it. It is exactly in debates over difference where emotions are most divisive. In clashes over issues such as race, religion, ethnicity, and sexuality, contributions that are informed by fear, anger, hatred, and intolerance do little to further mutual understanding and instead perpetuate entrenched positions (e.g., Mummery & Rodan, 2003; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2004).

The polarized and angry tone of much mediated public debate has had serious consequences for views of political participation. In the context of a political culture in many Western democracies, characterized by a generally cynical attitude toward political engagements (e.g., Eliasoph, 1998), those who venture forth to engage in political discussion are often dismissed as so extreme in their positions as to verge on the insane (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2002). This not only is true for traditional news media's participatory forums, such as letters to the editor or radio phone-ins, but also characterizes descriptions of new media genre participants. For instance, in one study a focus group member, describing contributors of user-generated content, commented: “I've got a feeling that a high proportion of them might be people in hospitals with nothing better to do than sit around, people with mental health problems” (Wahl-Jorgensen et al., 2010, p. 186). Such a position clearly undermines claims that media forums for public debate have any significant role to play in contemporary democracies, and instead constructs them as “therapeutic” sites, or “safety valves” allowing the dangerously wound-up to let off steam by expressing grievances (e.g., Davis & Rarick, 1964).

In fact, the emotional pain and uncertainty that come with attempts at communicating across barriers of difference (Peters, 1999, p. 265) keep many people from engaging in conversation with different Others in the first place (Mutz, 2006; Witschge, 2004). With a proliferation of deliberative forums that has come about as a result of Internet platforms, it seems that the consequence has been a further fragmentation of public debate, leading to a multiplicity of discussions among like-minded participants rather than ones that seek to overcome difference (Papacharissi, 2010).

On the other hand, there is a significant body of work suggesting that emotionally engaged participation may have an important role to play because it fosters the conditions for empathy. Work on television talk shows has played a central role in opening up a discussion of the need to more broadly consider the potential benefits of emotional expression in participatory media genres. These benefits, it should be said, speak to a broader understanding of participation and empowerment than that envisioned by the liberal model, which primarily emphasizes citizens' deliberation around, and reaction to, key issues of government policy. For example, Livingstone and Lunt's (1994) Talk on Television looked at the opportunities for regular citizens to contribute to public debate on a variety of current affairs-based daytime television talk shows, and examined how program makers encourage and discourage particular forms of participation. Their work showed that these talk shows, in enabling studio audience members to hold politicians and experts accountable, carve out a space for “attempts to confront established power with the lived experience of ordinary people” (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994, p. 160). They proposed that the television talk shows they studied, by combining opportunities for personal storytelling and public debate, may “support an emancipatory public sphere” (Livingstone & Lunt, 1994, p. 160; see also McNair et al., 2003; Squire, 2001).

Laura Grindstaff (2002) has suggested that the power of talk shows comes from how they emotionally engage their audiences, in moments of “joy, sorrow, rage or remorse expressed in visible, bodily terms” that are the “hallmark of the genre” (p. 19, 20). For these reasons, the opportunity for individuals to speak in their own emotionally charged voices on television talk shows points us toward a recognition of the complex relationship between rationality and emotion in mediated public participation, and to the ways in which an emerging personalized form of public debate is also often and inevitably emotionalized, even as it clearly ties into explicitly political issues (see also Squire, 2001). To Squire (2001), the “public emotionality of the Oprah Winfrey Show, for instance, has inserted ‘race,’ violence against women, child abuse and, through the recent Book of the Month selections, literacy and literature, into the televisual culture of citizenship” (p. 32).

Personalized storytelling, as an expressive form, clashes with ideals of rational participation because it is embodied, partial, emotional, and based on what are essentially private experiences made public. Yet citizens and journalists alike see it both as a guarantor of authenticity and as an opening to a shared understanding of how ongoing events and controversial issues affect individuals and communities precisely because it allows participants to understand the experience of the “Other,” who is seen as an authentic being because she can convincingly account for her feelings (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2001). Certainly theorists have long recognized the power of storytelling to explore matters of the common good. Ted Glasser (1991) proposed that narrative can:

This is precisely because personalized storytelling enables empathy, or the identification with and understanding of another's situation, feelings, and motives. Empathy is fundamentally an emotional reaction, even if it enables rational consideration of the issue at hand. As Daryl Koehn (1998) has argued, the use of empathy in interactions with others can radically transform one's world view and thus one's moral standpoint:

The rise of the talk show and other populist genres that open up opportunities for emotional expression in public – and hence the mobilization of empathy – has occurred alongside a set of broader debates about changes in languages and registers of political discourse which see the emotionalization of public expression as a powerful emerging resource for cultivating engagement and understanding. These changes result from the increasing scrutiny of the few and the powerful by the many, or the “transformation of visibility” (Thompson, 1995). The dominance of television as the medium for communicating politics has meant that visual imagery, charisma, and personality have come to the forefront of coverage of politics, resulting in the personalization of politics (e.g., Langer, 2010). Political coverage focuses overwhelmingly on the personalities and personal lives of political leaders. Concretely, this has meant that political leaders, in their attempts to communicate with the public, are drawing on the very same strategies of personalized and emotionalized storytelling embodied in formats such as the television talk shows. For political leaders, the ability to show themselves as “human” through emotional expression is now seen as a central quality for leadership, and the personalized and emotionalized performance is part of the ritual “character test” of the election campaign, as candidates now routinely subject themselves to the scrutiny of talk shows and the narrativization of their personal lives. That a performance of emotionality is central to the ritual of political performance was powerfully demonstrated in the prominence given to glimpses of candidate emotion, for example, extensive coverage of the tears of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden during the 2008 presidential election campaigns in the United States, and, in the UK, those of Gordon Brown on Piers Morgan's interview program in 2010.

More broadly, the process of personalization is also informed by the close relationship between popular culture and politics. As Richards (2004) suggested, that “popular culture is increasingly entering and shaping politics, constituting everyday politics in the content and channels of political communications, in the dynamics of public opinion, and in the values and decisions of individual citizens” (p. 342). Among other things, politicians draw on the genres, languages, and styles of popular culture, while popular culture figures are involved in politics (Louw, 2010; Street, 2001; van Zoonen, 2000, 2005). This development significantly contributes to the emotionalization of politics, insofar as “the popular has always to some extent been a domain of passion, and of emotional release” (Richards, 2004, p. 342). It signals the importance of understanding the emotive roots of our political commitments, as well as our emotional responses to policies and politicians (Richards, 2004, p. 347). This, in turn, necessitates the recognition that reasonable matters may be dramatized in an emotional fashion through the theater of public life (Richards, 2004, p. 339). The mediatization of political life, in turn, enables and underwrites such emotional dramatization. As Thrift (2008) has argued, “political presentation increasingly conforms to media norms of presentation which emphasize the performance of emotion as being an index of credibility. Increasingly, political legitimation arises from this kind of performance” (p. 184).

Overall, these developments signal the recognition of the central place of emotion in public discourse as a potential means of promoting identification and mutual understanding, and one which is not necessarily opposed to rationality. It would seem that it is, in fact, only through emotional storytelling that we can gain the empathy required for mutual understanding and, hence, for accessing horizons beyond those of our own self-interest to act as informed citizens. As such, the positive emotion of empathy – elicited, in turn, through emotional storytelling – is indispensable for a political discussion that moves us beyond the absolutist and entrenched parameters that often result from the play of negative emotions. As Mansbridge (2003) put it, if “emotional as well as rational commitments are required for people to experience the good of the whole even when their narrow self-interest conflicts with that good, then emotions must play a legitimate role in deliberation” (p. 198). Clearly, therefore, far from assuming that emotions have no place in public, or that they are naturally and invariably opposed to rationality, we need to understand the complex interplay of the range of distinctive positive and negative emotions, and how they structure public participation.

Conclusion

Taken together, the work of sociologists, philosophers, and media and communication scholars alerts us to the significance of emotion as a force in political life. Among other things, this body of work demonstrates that emotion cannot be excluded from considerations of politics, but should rather be understood as integral to its expressive forms and the ways in which citizens engage with it, and that rationality does not necessarily preclude emotion. On the contrary, emotional engagement enables the empathy necessary for citizens to fully understand the issues that concern us all. Through emotional storytelling, what are often abstract issues of the common good are given specificity that enables identification and understanding between participants and audiences.

Nonetheless, as I have discussed, emotion is not always a constructive force in politics. First of all, many of the emotions that mobilize political participation are negative, such as fear, anger, and disgust. Second, emotional involvement also has a well-documented polarizing effect on public discourse, which often renders civil deliberation impossible and instead leads to arguments based on irreconcilable differences that are unlikely to ever bring about constructive resolution, whether through consensus, negotiation, or other strategies.

To do justice to actually existing political practice, scholars must begin to engage with the concrete ways in which particular emotions encourage particular forms of public participation and expression while discouraging others, and to understand how power relations in society are productive of particular affective constellations. This effort should also entail a careful consideration of how to structure forums for public participation in ways that create conditions for public debate that work meaningfully across boundaries of difference and disagreement. In an environment of ever-proliferating sites and opportunities for public discussion, we need to raise questions about how to create forums that generate empathy instead of closing down the mutual understanding we need to make democracies work. We cannot automatically share the utopian position that more participation and discussion is better for democracy (cf. Møller Hartley, 2011), but instead must cultivate forums and procedures of mediated public participation that can foster empathy and solidarity, while recognizing the limitations of others that perpetuate division and difference.

Indeed, after an early rush to support a plethora of participatory sites enabled by online technologies, news organizations are now making difficult decisions about scaling back their involvement in forums that have offered little in the way of constructive public debate. To give just one example, after research on the BBC's practices around user-generated content demonstrated that message boards were disliked by both journalists and audience members for the incivility and negativity that they fostered (Wardle & Williams, 2008), the corporation has decided to significantly limit their use. At the same time, experiments with citizen journalism continue to foster optimism about the ability of ordinary citizens to participate in public debate by drawing on their experience and expertise (Deuze, Bruns & Neuberger, 2007).

Future research on political communication would do well to ask a series of key questions about the characteristics of existing and emerging forums for participation, which take into consideration the centrality of emotion and its varied manifestations. At the theoretical level, such research should be premised on the inherent role of emotion as a structuring dimension of citizenship, and seek to improve the prevailing approaches to mediated public participation with that insight in mind. At the empirical level, such research should take seriously the nature of emotional public discourse. It should chart how particular expressive sites (like message boards, talk radio, Twitter, and user-generated content) encourage particular forms of emotional expression, and understand how specific emotions (like anger, disgust, tolerance, and empathy, to mention a few complicated examples discussed here) can work to both help and hinder constructive public discussion, depending on the social, cultural, and political contexts in which the debates unfold. Further, it should consider how these forms of emotional expression affect audiences – in other words, how audience members respond with engagement or disengagement, anger or happiness, and empathy or distancing, to name just a few possibilities. Future research in political communication should work to understand emotion as an indispensable and growing resource in political life.

NOTE

1 See Held (1987) for a compelling synthesis of the origins of liberal democratic theory.

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