The Growing Emotionalization of Political Discourse? Insights from Parliamentary Speeches and Social Media in Four European Countries

Recent studies in political science and sociology emphasize the growing importance of the emotionalization of political messages combined with processes of polarization, the rise in popularity of populist parties using emotions in their political messages, as well as the rise of social media, which is displacing traditional media as sources of information and gatekeepers in the pubic sphere. However, the assumption of growing emotionalization understood as the increasing legitimization and intensification of emotional expressions in public discourse is much more often made a priori, or based on limited data, than it is proven on the basis of the analysis of larger data sets. The aim of the paper is to comparatively examine the emotionalization of political discourse across four European countries—Hungary, Germany, France, and Poland using the parliamentary and social media discourse. The research aims to address the gap in emotion analysis by developing a fine-tuned multilingual model, XLM-RoBERTa, capable of detecting six emotions: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and "none" at the sentence level. The study is driven by two research questions: Has political discourse become more emotionally charged over time? What factors—such as party affiliation, policy salience, and opposition status—drive these trends? Drawing on the existing literature, the study tests a number of assumptions. First, we test whether one can detect a growing emotionality over time. Secondly, whether the opposition speeches contain more emotionally charged and negative content than incumbent parties. Thirdly, whether the radical right wing populist parties resort to more emotionalized discourse than mainstream political actors. Fourthly, whether there are discernible tendencies between the level of emotionality across various policy topics over time. Finally, we analyze to what extent the emotionalization and negativity are leading to higher engagement metrics. The findings suggest a growing trend of emotionalization in political communication, driven by opposition dynamics, issue salience, and populist strategies. The study highlights the implications for democratic dialogue, emphasizing the need for balanced emotional expression to foster constructive political engagement. Future research will expand to include causal analyses across European contexts and integrate non-verbal cues for a holistic understanding of emotionalization in politics.