Affective Polarisation in the Facebook Posts of Danish and Brazilian Political Leaders

And the last speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is my colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting one of the research projects within my Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Here are his slides:

This project examined the Brazilian and Danish elections of 2022, with particular focus on the leading contenders in each election: Bolsonaro and Lula in Brazil, and Ellemann-Jensen and Frederiksen in Denmark. We collected the Facebook posts by these leaders, using CrowdTangle, and engaged in a manual coding (by a Brazilian and a Dane) of these posts for the emotions portrayed (both towards domestic opponents and towards other nations), out of a list of 34 possible emotions identified in the literature.

Patterns were diverse: all candidates portrayed some degree of pride; while Bolsonaro heavily relied on contempt, disgust, and other negative emotions and never emoted excitement, satisfaction, or interest.

Sebastian now explores joyful emotions, in particular: for Lula, joy was portrayed by receiving the adoration of the crowd, while for Ellemann-Jensen, this was standing on an empty street in front of his election poster. By contrast, Bolsonaro posted lengthy posts with direct and personal attacks on Lula; while Fredriksen only once used contempt in a very mild way by showing her concerns about an opponents’ views. Overall, the Danish candidates were considerably more restrained in their use of emotion in their posting – but the differences were as much driven by personality as by cultural differences.

We see, therefore, differing cultural and communicative norms across the two nations. Further, use of emotions are not necessarily strong predictors of polarisation; similar emotions are being used in very different ways by these politicians.