Outrage and moral panic have become driving forces in global politics – but what role should emotions play in democratic governance? On the new episode of Standard Time, researchers examine the influence of moral emotions and their implications for political life.
The emotional charge of politics has increased in the past decades. Expert governance and fact-based leadership were the leading claims in the 2000s, often ignoring that expertise wasn’t a neutral position either. As the pendulum swings back, strongly charged political speech is king today, and the conventional politicians who cannot muster this are openly mocked.
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Emotions have always played a large part in politics. The idea of a level-headed and rational approach to governance is quite new. In the few thousand years of recorded human history, religion and politics weren’t even separated for the most part. Neither are they today across much of the globe. The Enlightenment made the case for separating the church from the state and argued that reason and rationality have to take the place of faith in informing decisions. They thought that those in power are not divinely ordained but answerable to the people they govern. Since their surfacing in the 17th and 18th centuries, these ideas came to inform the democratic experiments of many countries, but now even secularism is being questioned by right-wing politicians.
The model example of the level-headed and reserved politician was long-time German chancellor and sometime quantum chemist Angela Merkel. Leader of the German CDU party for decades and was often referred to as the de facto leader of the EU, Merkel was renowned for her calm and measured communication. This was put to the test when Vladimir Putin tried to instill some fear into her by bringing a large black dog into a meeting; just for context, Merkel has been famously super afraid of dogs. Instead of the expected freak-out, the German Chancellor smiled and shrugged it off in front of the cameras.
It isn’t true, however, that Merkel never displayed emotion. Instead, she operated in a specific range; for instance, when other EU leaders started to stir up a refugee crisis in 2015, Merkel famously responded wir: ‘Wir schaffen es!’ That is, ‘We’ll deal with this!’ It’s no coincidence that she earned the nickname Mutti, Mommy in German, as she projected a cool and collected authority that made some feel very safe about her – to others, it felt patronizing.
Merkel is a polar opposite from today’s main players like Donald Trump, whose boasting and roaring style aims to dominate an audience instead of leading them. The new Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum displays an interesting mixture of composure and compassion as she negotiates with an erratic Trump administration.
Closer to home, the log-ailing German left party, Die Linke has seen a stellar rise in new party members since this year began: more than 20 thousand people have joined the left wing party in the first months of the year, which constitutes now a quarter of all members. Many of them joined right after Heidi Reichinneck’s fiery speech went viral on TikTok:
@heidireichinnek Die spontane Rede nach dem Dammbruch.
Reichinneck is mobilizing young voters with her dynamic and outspoken style and very obvious displays of anger and projection of strength – even if it’s a strength of conviction, and not of electoral victory.
Grievance politics have arisen as a major phenomenon, used for ‘fueling and funneling of negative emotions and various blame-based political strategies.’
Emotional charge is a very important motivator used to mobilize and engage crowds for one or another player. However, the more polarized the charge, the less room it leaves for compromise in a negotiation, which is arguably the main means of political action in a parliamentary setting. Political principles and advantages are one issue; governability is a wholly other matter.
The speakers of this episode work together in cross-roder research projects to analyze the role of emotions in politics and develop tools to deal with them.
Zsolt Boda is the director general of the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences, a political scientist working primarily on public policy and governance. He previously led an international research project on populism, and is now heading the MORES project on moral emotions in politics.
Gabriella Szabó is senior research fellow at the HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences. Her research interests lie in the area of political communication, emotions and moral rhetoric. Her latest book is titled ‘Managing Moral Emotions in Divided Politics’. She is also a contributor to the MORES and the PLEDGE research projects.
Mikko Salmela specialises in the philosophy of emotions from an empirically informed perspective. In recent years, he has applied this expertise to studying the emotional dynamics of populism with a novel theoretical framework that constitutes the foundation of the Horizon Europe project PLEDGE at the University of Helsinki.
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Disclosure
This talk show is a Display Europe production: a ground-breaking media platform anchored in public values.
This programme is co-funded by the European Commission and the European Cultural Foundation.
Importantly, the views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors and speakers only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor the EACEA can be held responsible for them.
Published 16 May 2025
Original in English
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