Abstract
European Union (EU)-based Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) are usually pictured as well-established professionalized actors basing their advocacy strategies on the provision of expertise. Does the focus on expertise imply the removal of emotions and feelings from political communication? Following the emotion turn in social movement and collective action studies, this article investigates how and why EU-based CSOs use emotions in their advocacy strategies. The article shows first how CSOs use rhetorical appeals to emotions and rhetorical appeals to reason in their communication. Secondly, the focus is directed to emotion-inspired advocacy strategies, namely blaming and shaming, fear-mongering and boosting. The choice of rhetorical appeals and strategies is mainly explained by three different inter-related factors: the logics of influence, the logics of membership and media logics. Empirical data is drawn from a content analysis of press releases and policy documents of environmental (climate change) and human rights (refugee crisis) CSOs active at the EU level and from semi-structured interviews with key CSO representatives.
Highlights
Do Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) act from the heart or from the head? After the end of the 1960s, emotions tended to play almost no role in the understanding of social movements and collective action, since rational, structural and organizational models dominated political analysis (Calhoun, 2001; Goodwin, Jasper, & Poletta, 2001)
Regarding the particular topic of CSOs in the European Union (EU), the emphasis has been placed on their expertise, their consensus-seeking strategies and their professionalism, and little attention has been given to the role that emotions might have played in their advocacy strategies
This section introduces first the main concepts used in this article, namely CSOs and emotions, and discusses very briefly the study of emotions in social movements and collective action research
Summary
Do Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) act from the heart or from the head? After the end of the 1960s, emotions tended to play almost no role in the understanding of social movements and collective action, since rational, structural and organizational models dominated political analysis (Calhoun, 2001; Goodwin, Jasper, & Poletta, 2001). Emotions have attracted increasing scholarly attention in the 2000s, even if they have not deeply transformed the understanding of sociological and political theory (Calhoun, 2001). Despite this increasing interest, many sub-disciplines within the field of political science, such as European studies or interest groups research, have not dedicated much attention to the role of emotions. The empirical part applies the proposed framework It shows how and why the analyzed CSOs use appeals to reason and emotions in their political communication and to which extent these CSOs use emotions in advocacy strategies including examples such as blaming and shaming, fear mongering and boosting
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