Affective Representation: Capturing Preferences for Emotions of Dutch and American Voters

Politicians use increasingly emotional rhetoric. But what emotions do citizens want to hear from their politicians? And do they want politicians to use these emotions more or less? To investigate this, I report findings from five studies from two countries (the US and Netherlands). The results show strong preferences for more positive emotions, and less negative emotions. There are remarkably few differences between partisans of different parties. The paper speculates that there may be a mismatch in affective representation: politics is too negative for most citizens, they are affectively misrepresented. The paper ends with proposing to add affective representation to the growing list of affective concepts in political science.