Feeling Politics: New Research into Emotion and Politics

Abstract

Politics is about feeling. For all the apparent desire of many political scientists to boil down political action to rational actors assessing their utilities for the options that they face (whether about voting, policy choices, legislative action, etc.) using some cool—unemotional—calculus, new research presented in this book and elsewhere reaffirms a central role for passion in politics. Since politics is concerned at its most basic level with the allocation of scarce resources, and since this means some people get things while others do not, it is not surprising that peoples’ feelings are an important part of any political calculus. This is not a new idea. Madison, after all, placed great emphasis on the need to control the inherent “passions” of the citizenry in the political arena, even going so far as devising a Constitutional system explicitly designed to minimize the role of emotion in politics. Any attempt to explain political action by considering only its cognitive roots is certain to result in only a partial explanation, and a not very good one in the end.