Emotions, social media, and politics: a scoping review

Social media features emotionally laden political discussions among citizens. In recent years, scholars have dedicated attention to the role of emotions in these environments, while being confronted with challenges that come with conceptualizing and operationalizing emotions. We take stock of quantitative citizen-level research by conducting a scoping review of 189 research articles (including 204 empirical studies) in communication and political science published between 2013 and 2024. We find a dominance of experiments and cross-sectional surveys. Studies primarily focus on the United States and Europe. Research often fails to connect to established theories of emotions and faces shortcomings in the conceptualization of emotions. Measurement approaches rely heavily on self-reports and text analysis, each with notable limitations. Based on our findings, we identify key needs for future research: stronger grounding in theories of emotions, clearer definitions of emotions, more rigorous approaches to measuring emotions, greater attention to positive emotions, and inclusion of visual-based platforms.