Anger, Fear, and Disgust? The European Refugee Crisis and Populist Right Parties as Harbingers of a New Emotional Communication

The Refugee crisis had a massive impact on the political discourse and on the transformation of party systems all over Europe. While prior research focused on changes in policy positions and issue salience, little research focused on emotional dynamics during the refugee crisis. This study argues that populist radical right parties served as drivers of a new emotional style in political communication during the crisis, focusing primarily on negative emotional appeals such as anger, fear, and disgust. This paper analyses how these emotions in connection with derogatory frames spread before, during, and after the crisis. It further analyses how mainstream parties changed their issue salience, policy positions, and emotionality in response to the populist right actors. The study is based on a large corpus of party press releases and Facebook posts from three European countries. It further applies a number of computational methods, such as Structural Topic Modelling, Wordscores, and a novel emotional dictionary, that can identify reliably emotional appeals in political communication. The results have important implications for the impact of populist parties on political communication and party competition.