Fear, Hope, and COVID‐19: Emotional Elite Rhetoric and Its Impact on the Public During the First Wave of the COVID‐19 Pandemic

Abstract

Research shows that emotions matter in politics, and they matter during a public health crisis. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of emotional political rhetoric during the COVID‐19 crisis is still missing. Based on parties' position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties), I expect differences in how specific emotions are employed and in how these messages actually influence the public. To test my hypotheses, I use word embeddings and neural network classifiers to measure fear and hope appeals in social media messages of political parties in four European countries. Furthermore, I rely on more than 1,400,000 public tweets of random citizens to estimate the impact of party messages. To do so, I employ vector autoregression (VAR) analysis to compare retweet volumes of political messages to emotional expressions in public tweets. Results indicate two main findings, (1) populist radical parties communicate less about the pandemic and decrease fear and increase hope appeals while COVID case numbers are rising whereas government parties exhibit the opposite pattern; (2) increased diffusion of party tweets consistently precedes change in partisans' emotional expressions the following day. The findings can carry important implications for (affective) polarization and the level of protective behavior among the population.

Government-Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) Collaboration in Macao’s COVID-19 Vaccine Promotion: Social Media Case Study

“…The VAR models captured the dynamic feedback system and gave estimates for the short-term effects of TV news coverage on public perception by demonstrating a unidirectional process wherein changes in news salience led to significant changes in public salience. In addition, VAR models have also been used to investigate the dynamic mapping relationship between the diffusion of political messages and emotional expression in public messages during the COVID-19 pandemic [ 61 ]. The increased diffusion of political messages positively predicted changes in emotional expression among citizens, and the VAR model was able to explain the interdependencies among variables based on the lag values of multiple time series.…”

Is society caught up in a Death Spiral? Modeling societal demise and its reversal

“…In general, under such conditions, distrust escalates as the elite starts to fear the masses and the masses fear the elite and both tend to show dysfunctional behavior ( cf. Widmann, 2022 ). When in phase 4 ( Figure 2 ) resources dwindle as a result of the continuously downward spiral, the desperation principle may apply.…”

Selling hope versus hate: the impact of partisan social media messaging on social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Hope serves as a potent tool for politicians, as it allows them to paint a vision of a brighter future and inspire EJM 58,2 belief in the possibility of change (Lazarus, 1991;MacInnis and De Mello, 2005). Hope is particularly effective when people are anxious and uncertain and seeking reassurance and leadership (Widmann, 2022). Conversely, politicians have also been known to use hate in their messages, such as when they target specific individuals or groups to stoke negative emotions such as fear and resentment (Ittefaq et al, 2022).…”