Fear, Hope, and COVID-19: Strategic Emotional Rhetoric in Political Communication and its Impact on the Mass Public

Abstract

Effective political communication can constitute a key component of pandemic responses. Yet, a comprehensive analysis of party communication during COVID-­19 is still missing. To analyze how parties communicate about the crisis, I turn to emotions which play a vital role in influenc­ing attitudes and behavior during pandemics. Based on parties’ position in the political arena (government versus populist radical parties) I expect differences in emotional rhetoric and impact on public opinion. To test my hypotheses, I use word embeddings and neural network classifiers to analyze social media messages of political parties in four European countries and more than 160,000 tweets of random samples of citizens in two of these countries. Further­more, I employ fixed­-effects regression models and vector autoregression (VAR) analysis to compare retweet volumes of political messages to emotional expressions in public tweets. Re­sults indicate two main findings, (1) populist radical parties communicate less about the pan­demic and strategically downplay the crisis severity while COVID-19 cases are rising; (2) increased diffusion of populist messages consistently precedes change in citizens’ emotional expression about the pandemic. This finding can carry important implications for the level of protective behavior among the population.