Fifty Shades of Anger: Dynamics of Public Emotion Articulation and Moralization in Political Scandal

Stating the increased attention to emotions in political and media studies, I try to contribute to these new developments by providing tools to analyze affective persuasion in public moralization. First, I conceptualize the difference between affect and emotion in that I define the former as a rather vague and general excitement or arousal, whereas I understand the latter as specific emotions with identifiable structures. Second, on this difference I base the scheme of affective persuasion in which I distinguish emotionalization and emotion management. While emotionalization is an implicit quality of public communication moving the public, emotion management is a specific and more explicit shaping of people’s emotions. Thirdly, I apply these dimensions of affective persuasion to analyze political scandal communication: I follow anger’s career from initial excitement to moral outrage and later self-righteous contempt, processes unavoidably accompanied by strong moralization. Lastly, I show how emotionalization and management of anger emotions intertwine. Rather than one-time transition from general affect to specific emotion there seems to be a constant interchange between both dimensions of emotional persuasion. The way these dimensions are used, however, has a significant if not definitive impact on the success of moralization and denunciation in the scandal. To illustrate the dynamics of emotion articulation and moralization, I use the scandal of German Defense minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg, also called Copy-gate. He was accused of plagiarizing his doctoral thesis and resigned two weeks later. In this time between the first accusations and resignation, major shift in public discourse and opinion from the scandalization attempt to the full-blown scandal took place of which emotional dynamics was a great part. I conducted discourse analysis of the media communication, more specifically, online media coverage (süddeutsche.de and welt.de) of this scandal.