Stephen Whitefield, Sara Hobolt and Eamonn Molloy win Fell Fund grant for study of emotions in party manifestos

We were just using different words to mean the same thing: Exploring the Affective Norms of Political Party Manifestos.

We know that emotions play an important role in politics. Yet, we lack systematic evidence of how politicians use emotional appeals in their political messages. This innovative and exploratory project will critically evaluate the potential of analysing large corpora of political documents using psycholinguistic methodology. To do so, over 2800 political party manifestos from Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States from 1944 to the present day will be analysed in terms of their emotional affect. Data will be sourced from two internationally recognised and validated databases: The Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) and the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) ratings. The expectation is that by systematically evaluating the emotional affect of political party manifestos in relation to explicit and known political positions, significant insights into key political science questions can be advanced. Specifically, we will be able to examine when and how politicians use emotional appeals in their political messages and how such appeals influence public opinion. If successful, the scope for extending this approach beyond political parties manifestos to other political and organizational material is vast. The findings of this study therefore have implications for both academics and policy-makers. For academics, there is the promise of a substantial new research agenda that is both intellectually original and has the ability to attract funding from the policy-making community. For policy-makers, the results generated by this new research agenda will directly impact on the way they communicate with and represent themselves to diverse stakeholder constituencies.

(Photo courtesy of Steve Collins.)