Emotions in Politics

Abstract

The study of emotion in politics has been active, especially as it relates to the personality of political leaders and as an explanation for how people evaluate significant features around them. Researchers have been divided into two groups—those who study leaders and those who study publics. The research programs have also been divided between those who use emotion to explain reliance on early experience that dominates contemporary judgment and those who use emotion to explain why people respond to the immediate contemporary circumstances around them. More recently, theory and research have attempted to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory roles by integrating them. Emotion's role in politics is pervasive both because emotion enables past experience to be encoded with its evaluative history and because emotion enables contemporary circumstances to be quickly evaluated. More recently still, theoretical models and supporting evidence suggest that there are multiple channels of emotional evaluations.