How The Emotions of Politicians Explain their Representative Behavior

forthcoming

TEMPER sheds new light on the representative behavior of individual politicians by addressing an overlooked driver of that behavior: their emotions. What makes politicians decide to be responsive to public opinion signals at some occasions, but not at others? And how do politicians go about communicating their viewpoints, sometimes using very emotional or uncivil language, and at other times not? Whereas extant research has been preoccupied with studying the cognitive, strategic reasons that politicians may have to act so-or-so, TEMPER focuses on the emotional explanations of their behavior. It sketches a portrait of politicians who are, above everything, human. Doing so, TEMPER bridges the gap between theories of elite behavior and theories of the political behavior of citizens, which have—relying on insights from psychology—taken an ‘emotional turn’ decades ago. As emotions arise in response to concrete situations of signals, TEMPER pays attention to the situations or signals that provoke politicians to communicate and act. Its objectives are to explain (1) how characteristics of situations or signals elicit emotions in politicians, (2) how these emotions influence their subsequent representative behavior, and (3) how the resulting ‘emotional explanation’ of behavior maps onto existing (mostly cognitive) explanations of behavior. TEMPER studies the emotions of politicians directly, in a series of (1) survey-experiments with politicians; (2) interviews with politicians; and (3) direct observations of actual media debates and party meetings. It combines self-reported measures of emotion with psychophysiological measures of affect, which are less susceptible to rationalization and social desirability. The findings of TEMPER will reveal how patterns that we currently interpret as strategic behaviors may, in fact, be grounded in emotional mechanisms.