Emotion narratives of presidential candidates and populist voting behaviour

The rise of right wing populism is strongly due to the capacity to mobilise national memory and identity to define emotion narrative - entangling both positive and negative emotions - able to The impact on voting behaviour. For this reason the mobilisation of emotions by political leaders during the electoral campaign is under increasing scrutiny of transdisciplinary scholarship. It is especially revealing to analyze political contexts where the national memory and identity are strong and populism is emerging and/or in the rise, because the entanglement among these two conditions is central in the nourishment of populist growth. While right wing populism has entered the political system of a number of European countries in the last two decades, Portugal is the most recent case to testify the upsurge of this kind of populist phenomena. As a semi-presidential system, Portugal offers great exposition to analyze the emotion narratives mobilised during the Presidential campaign were the candidates do not represent but may be supported by political forces. The hypothesis is that populist candidates mobilise national memory and identity to define their emotion narrative outlining a set of ingroup-outgroup emotion relations. Through a mixed methodology the paper analyzes quantitative data collected with the portuguese electorate after the Presidential Election of 24 January 2021, and a qualitative data analysis of interview and debates by election’s candidates in the three national TV broadcasters during the last two months before elections. Findings of the study contribute to shed light in the relationship between emotion narratives mobilised by election’s candidates and voting behaviour.