FRAMING EMOTIONS: A SYNTHESIS FOR STUDYING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND POLITICS

FRAMING EMOTIONS: A SYNTHESIS FOR STUDYING SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND POLITICS Steven Saxonberg (Södertörn University, Sweden) and Miroslav Pažma (Comenius University, Slovakia) In the 1980s, it became common to use the framing approach to analyze social movements and then, in the following decade, an emotional approach also emerged. Proponents of the frame analysis have often admitted that frames must play on emotions in order to get resonance, but other than sometimes admitting that diagnostic frames are usually based on anger or moral outrage, they pay little attention to emotions. Yet, if prognostic and motivational frames are also essential for mobilizing people, then we need to know which emotions these frames play on. Similarly, although social movement theorists of emotions sometimes admit that activists need to frame emotions in order to mobilize people or at least emotions can be analyzed as frames, it is also quite rare for them to discuss what types of frames use different types of emotions. If all three frames (diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational frames) are necessary for mobilizing people, then by ignoring the emotions that all three frames use, we are unable to understand how emotions influence mass protests. Meanwhile, in the discussions about populism, there is an emerging trend toward applying frame analysis to the discourses that populist politicians and parties use and as well as a trend to look at what emotions these parties and their leaders play on (especially the role of resentment, fear and anger). Again, it has not been common to combine frame analysis with an emotional approach here. From the methodological standpoint, although scholars claim to be applying frame analysis, they usually merely apply content analysis and call the contents a “frame.” Yet, recently some scholars – especially those from the social movement tradition – have begun to analyze populism as some kind of a “master frame” and apply the Benford-Snow model of diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames. Consequently, an approach that discusses which emotions each type of frame plays on could be used for both analyzing social movements and political movements/parties. This can evoke a certain type of content analysis – one that combines both quantitative approaches (to look at salience) and qualitative approaches (to see the exact wording of emotional appeals in frames and to emphasize the emergence of important phrases that might not be used often but still have great impact) – but the content analyze should be done in a way that shows how each of the different types of frames plays on different types of emotions. In order to show how one can integrate emotional approaches with frame analysis, our paper will give examples from the Slovak social movement “For a Decent Slovakia” and the populist party Smer-SD (Direction), which has dominated Slovak politics for much of the new millennium. It will, thus, show the emotional framing of the two conflicting sides of the 2018 Slovak political crisis, which led to the resignation of the Slovak prime minister Robert Fico.