Unfiltered Feelings: Exploring Emotions and Affective Polarization Through Open-Ended Responses

Affective polarization has emerged as a cornerstone concept in understanding politically driven conflict, gridlock, and societal divisions. While the term inherently emphasizes the emotional nature of political ingroup and outgroup relations, the specific role of discrete emotions in affective polarization remains underexplored. Political scientists often focus on theoretically salient emotions such as anger, fear, anxiety, pride, and hope, as well as more complex feelings like Schadenfreude. These emotions are typically measured using self-reported survey scales, which may inadvertently prime respondents and amplify emotional responses to political ingroups and outgroups. This study offers a novel approach by employing open-ended questions to capture unprimed emotional responses toward the most and least liked political parties. Using original survey data from the Czech Republic (n=2,225), representative of the adult population, we compare the results of traditional emotion scales with text-as-data analyses of open-ended responses. By analyzing the emotional content of these unstructured evaluations, we assess whether unprimed responses reflect the same discrete emotions prioritized in political emotion theories. Furthermore, we explore the extent to which emotions shape partisan evaluations and contribute to affective polarization. Our findings advance the methodological and theoretical understanding of political emotions by providing a more nuanced and unfiltered perspective on the emotional underpinnings of affective polarization. This study underscores the need to reconsider conventional measures of political emotions and highlights the value of open-ended, text-based approaches for studying the role of emotions in partisan conflict.