Breeze 2019 - Emotion in politics Affective- discursive practices in UKIP and Labour PDF

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801074 r es ear ch-ar ticl 2018

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10.1177/0957926518801074Dis co urs e & So cietyBreeze

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Emotion in politics: Affectivediscursive practices in UKIP and Labour

Discourse & Society 2019, Vol. 30(1) 24–43 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0957926518801074 journals.sagepub.com/home/das

Ruth Breeze Universidad de Navarra, Spain.

Abstract Recent political trends in many countries have sparked renewed interest in populism. Despite general agreement that the affective/emotive aspects of political communication are particularly important in this, there is little recent analysis of how populists operationalise emotion or how they genuinely differ from mainstream parties in this sense. This article applies mixed methods to explore the ‘affective-discursive practices’ that characterise the discourses of two opposition parties in the United Kingdom: United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and Labour. Comparison of the frequency of semantic subcategories related to emotion in corpora of press releases published by these parties on their websites is complemented by qualitative analysis of how specific emotional areas such as fear, anger and anxiety are invoked by the two parties. Different ‘affective-discursive practices’ underpin their discourses, since Labour characteristically frames reactions to social phenomena in terms of worry and concern, while UKIP legitimates fear and anger, but also projects more positive emotions.

Keywords Emotion, affective-discursive practices, political discourse, discourse analysis

Introduction The flight from the centre among European voters over recent years has been widely documented, as trust in mainstream political parties has been undermined by their failure to deal satisfactorily with the financial crisis and its aftermath, by controversies over migration issues and by widespread perceptions of corruption. It is difficult to generalise about the new political movements that have arisen in this context: some can be described Corresponding author: Ruth Breeze, Instituto Cultura y Sociedad, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Navarra, Spain. Email: [email protected]

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as right-wing (FIDESZ), some as left-wing (SYRIZA, Podemos), while others are hard to classify in these terms (Cinque Stelle); some are new (Alternative für Deutschland), whereas others have a long (Front National) or even very long (FPŐ) history, but most have gained considerable ground during the period of social and economic destabilisation since 2008 (Wodak et al., 2013; Mudde, 2016). Such parties, and their policies, behaviour and self-presentation, are often grouped together rather vaguely by the media and others under the umbrella term ‘populist’. Their perceived importance on the contemporary political scene has sparked renewed interest in populism, leading to intensified debate about the nature of political populism on the one hand, and populist styles of communication on the other. In this, the use of the word ‘populism’ itself requires some clarification. Although some commentators see it principally as a descriptor for policies aimed at redistributing wealth among the population (Dornbusch and Edwards, 1990), it has increasingly come to be understood as something other than a set of substantive policies. It is variously understood as a political logic that challenges accepted norms, which is used to unite diverse interests within the population (Laclau, 2005) or as a political strategy organised around the figure of a charismatic leader (Weyland, 2001). Others see it as a ‘thin ideology’ (Mudde, 2007) or a blend of thin ideology with other ideologies of the right or left (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017: 5). Many recent studies concur that it is more helpful to categorise populism as a phenomenon primarily associated with the discursive sphere. Building on Laclau (2005) and Mudde (2007), Moffitt’s (2016) study of populist politicians identifies key features of their discourse, self-presentation and performance that cut across traditional political dividing lines. These come together in a specific way of presenting one’s claims (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007), which includes the strong identification with ‘the people’ (presented as an indivisible unity with homogeneous interests) that has traditionally been understood as the hallmark of populism (Taggart, 2000). Such parties try to appeal to disgruntled voters by indulging in strong in- and out-grouping to engage sentiments of ethnic or class loyalty, while stigmatising out-groups as threats. Moffitt also establishes that populist discourses involve strategies for widening the divide between the people and their enemies/adversaries, who are both denigrated and delegitimised (Moffitt and Tormey, 2014). As Wodak (2017) shows, although these ‘enemies’ may vary, ‘the people’ are generally set up discursively against current power holders, loosely conceptualised as ‘the establishment’ or ‘the elite’, ‘within a specific narrative of threat and betrayal’ (Wodak, 2017: 552). In this dynamic, Moffitt (2015) stresses the central importance of building up a sense of crisis, often through highly emotive discourses, and then perpetuating this crisis to maintain social tension and legitimise drastic action against the people’s ‘enemies’. For him, ‘crisis’ is not a pre-existing situation of failure that has somehow sparked a populist response; following Hay (1999), he takes the view that ‘crisis is a condition in which systemic failure has become politically and ideationally mediated’ (p. 324). This can be achieved through the consistent use of particular discourses, and through what Moffitt (2016) terms ‘populist performance’, by which prominent public figures convincingly embody the values, emotions and aspirations of the populist cause. In all this, it is clear that one way of accessing the populist phenomenon is through the discourses that the parties and their prominent adherents use. My account starts from the basis that social and cultural movements in contemporary society exist as discourses, as

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well as in extra-discursive trends that run parallel to these (Fairclough and Chouliaraki, 2005: 4). Discourses are here understood as context-dependent semiotic practices which are both ‘socially constituted and socially constitutive’ (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009: 89), that is, they are conditioned by social structures and relations, but they also have an ongoing effect on the way these structures and relations are reconfigured. There is general agreement that the media have a key role in this process (Wodak, 2015), and in the case of new political movements there are suggestions that their performances are deliberately designed to attract maximum media attention (Wodak, 2015). Such performances tend to appeal largely through their non-representational content: their visceral appeal to basic emotions, often setting up ‘we’ on the ‘inside’ against threats from the outside, tends to override more rational considerations. As Chilton says, populism ‘works by activating emotion-laden and value-laden schematic concepts and concomitant emotions’ (2017: 592). By critically examining the discourses used by political parties in their media self-representations, we can reach a deeper understanding of the way ideological positions are generated and spread in broad sectors of society (Breeze, in press; Wodak, 2015: 50–54). Some previous studies have focused on the use of charismatic personalities and striking discursive strategies to attract media attention and appeal to particular sectors of the population (Wheeler, 2011; Wodak et al., 2013). However, despite general agreement that political persuasion does not remain on the level of ideation or representation – but that precisely in the populist context, the affective/emotive aspects of communication take on particular importance – less attention so far has focused on the emotions evoked or on how populists actually differ from mainstream parties in this sense. Van Leeuwen (2014) identified some distinguishing traits, such as frequent use of absolutes and categorical statements likely to provoke an emotional response. Breeze (2017) examined populist political style in terms of gradability and the creation of emotionally charged dichotomies. These studies generally suggest that this would be a useful line to pursue, particularly since recent research into emotions in politics from outside discourse studies (e.g. Wagner, 2014; Weber, 2013) has underlined the importance of the affective/emotional dimension in conditioning people’s political choices.

The affective dimension in discourse Although the importance of emotion in persuasive discourse has been recognised since ancient times, recent trends in discourse analysis have tended to foreground ideas and arguments over feelings, prioritising the unpacking of ideologies. As Wetherell (2012) has argued, discourse analysts have tended to separate affect (seen as an unruly and potentially dangerous element) from discourse proper (understood as ideology in language). This separation is problematic, not only because it is extremely difficult to abstract affective reactions from the ideas or objects that trigger them (Wetherell, 2015) but also because much ideological use of language becomes powerful precisely because it engages people’s feelings. Affect/emotion is a cultural-material hybrid, which cannot be understood without its discursive productions. Different cultures at different times seem to generate what have sometimes been termed different ‘emotional styles’ operating in communities in which people comply with the same norms for emotional expression

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and regulation – and ascribe the same values to different emotions (Gammerl, 2012). In this context, Wetherell et al. (2015) argue for an investigation of ‘affective-discursive practices’ exploring the relations between semiosis and feeling, to identify ‘patterned forms of human activity articulating, mobilising and organising affect and discourse as a central part of the practice’ (p. 57). Within the community at large, political positions offer different sets of practices with a collective ‘we’. Parties and movements not only share ideas and ways of speaking about them (i.e. discourses), but also promote particular ways of feeling about these issues (Grande, 2000; Wetherell et al., 2015). Politicians who can embody and express feelings that resonate with large sectors of the electorate, or who know how to carry voters with them on an affective level, are often highly successful, particularly in the age of YouTube videos, short sound bites and tweets (Frame and Brachotte, 2016). The ‘affective-discursive practices’ of a party’s spokespeople are likely to reflect the practices of its supporters, and vice versa, so that they reinforce each other, leading to escalation effects. In this article, I examine the emotions expressed in the press releases published by two UK political parties on their official websites. On the issue of emotions, two points need to be clarified. First, I follow Wetherell et al. (2015) in taking embodied meaning making as the object of my analysis, and in regarding affect and emotion as a single phenomenon for the purposes of analysis. Briefly, their argument (Wetherell et al., 2015) is that current psychological research on affect stresses ‘the simultaneity of the embodied registration of an event and meaning making’, which makes it hard to maintain a sharp distinction between affect (a kind of non-representational impact) and emotions (affect interpreted through culturally conventional categories with familiar labels). Emotion, in this view, is a manifestation of affect in real situations (p. 59). As Wetherell et al. (2015) say, ‘it is important to understand how emerging and assembling patterns of relations “engineer” human responses […] but this cannot work by black boxing distinctively human capacities for making meaning’ (p. 59). They therefore advocate a focus on ‘affective-discursive practices’, which ‘construct relations of proximity, distance, affiliation and detachment, and inclusion and exclusion’ (Wetherell et al., 2015: 58). My focus here is on the different range of ‘affective-discursive practices’ evidenced by different political parties, exploring how these organise their vision of society and endow their ideological positions with affective force. Second, I relate my findings to the concept of ‘feeling rules’ (Hochschild, 1979: 561), that is, socially accepted emotional responses. These are a mechanism for social control that works through encouraging ‘correct’ kinds of emotional behaviour for particular groups of people (Piwoni, 2018: 12), but these ‘rules’ can also change over time. When populist leaders publicly insist on particular emotions as a reaction to, say, migration or the European Union (EU), they are modelling and legitimising affective-discursive practices that were not previously mainstream in that culture, potentially changing the consensual feeling rules.

Texts and methodology There are several methodological problems in conducting an investigation of affective/ discursive practices in politics. One is that politicians across the spectrum make use of similar persuasive strategies to convince their audiences: they may all, on occasion, try

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to provoke emotional responses, activate group loyalties and enmities, whip up a sense of urgency and so on (Partington and Taylor, 2017). Furthermore, it is particularly important to note that all opposition parties are extremely likely to use negative strategies to discredit the governing party (Grande, 2000), which in emotional terms might involve indignation and anger, for example. Governing parties, by contrast, are likely to want to inspire confidence and trust, or encourage shared pride in their achievements. I therefore chose to focus on the affective/emotional discourses of two opposition parties in the same country, namely, the two main UK opposition parties in 2017, Labour and UKIP (in the 2015 general election, the ruling Conservative party received just over 11 million votes, Labour just over 9 million and UKIP nearly 4 million, while the traditional ‘third party’, the Liberal Democrats, had only 2.5 million). In general terms, UKIP can be broadly classified as a right-wing populist party, with high visibility, a deliberately shocking style and an outspoken anti-establishment stance (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2015; Hobolt, 2016). Labour under Corbyn adopts an intellectual approach to politics, avoiding sensationalism. Corbyn himself has been characterised as ‘a position politician in an era of valence and performance politics’ (Diamond, 2016: 21), committed to ‘honest politics’, who insists that ‘upholding moral principles outweighs attaining parliamentary power’ (Diamond, 2016: 17). Descriptions of Corbyn’s Labour as ‘populist’ seem mainly to be founded on radical policy proposals, rather than on his/its discursive self-presentation (Dean and Maiguashca, 2017: 56). In terms of methodology, this article proposes an innovative approach to the study of affect/emotion in political discourse using a mixed (quantitative and qualitative) approach based on the principles of corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Partington and Marchi, 2015), in which a qualitative reading is complemented by quantitative data showing the frequency of terms indicative of particular affective-discursive patterns. My study focuses on the press releases published on the parties’ websites in the first 3 months of 2017. First, corpora were created using the official news sites of two UK opposition parties, Labour and UKIP, for the first 3 months of 2017. This was a particularly interesting period in British politics, with confusion over Brexit, two by-elections and a terrorist attack outside the Houses of Parliament. Two corpora were created for each party, one covering 1 January to 14 February, the other 15 February to 31 March 2017 (Labour: 91,900 words; UKIP: 37,300 words). The logic behind the use of two corpora from each party was to compensate for bias as a result of particular events, and to determine whether the frequency of emotional signifiers yielded stable but different patterns in the two parties over time. The UKIP and Labour news corpora were uploaded to Wmatrix3 (Rayson, 2008) for semantic tagging. This tags all the words in the text according to meaning, classifying them as belonging to 21 major semantic fields subdivided into up to 100 subcategories. Semantic areas related to emotions were identified (tagged ‘E’ in Wmatrix3), and normalised frequencies were obtained by taking occurrences of subsets of emotion-related words per 100 running words. In its present form, this methodology can perhaps best be regarded as heuristic in nature, since it raises a number of questions. The most important of these is that the results are dependent on exactly what is detected by the semantic tagging tool used (which in the case of Wmatrix3 is based on McArthur, 1981). The sensitivity of the tool will influence the results obtained. Moreover, even an optimum tagset would be highly

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Graph 1. Emotional actions, states and processes in the four corpora (Frequency/100 words).

unlikely to detect implicit expressions of emotion (e.g. where irony or sarcasm is involved). The opposite problem also arises, which is that not all the tagged items may really have an emotional meaning in the given context, but this is arguably less serious because such items can easily be discarded manually. There is also a basic problem that besets any attempt to identify emotion in political texts, which is that politicians use many statements that would normally be regarded as simply factual in order to elicit emotions in their audiences. Unfortunately, this important question cannot be addressed using the present approach. Finally, it is important to state here that it is obviously not possible to address the fundamental interpersonal dimension of emotional discourse in a systematic way using semantic tagging; for example, such techniques tell us nothing about whether an emotion is being expressed by a writer/speaker, attributed to a third party or evoked/provoked in an audience. Qualitative analysis of contextualised uses of tagged items is currently the only way to shed light on this question, and in what follows, I will use this to bring out the different ways in which I consider that emotions are being expressed or elicited. On the other hand, the mixed methodology presented here offers the advantage of greater rigour and comparability than an exclusively qualitative approach, since exactly the same measures can be used on the different corpora. Following these principles, the most salient contrasts between the two parties were identified and then explored qualitatively using discourse analytical techniques.

Results and discussion Overview A quick overview was obtained of all items tagged as emotion-related in Wmatrix3 (see Appendix 1 for key to tags). As Graph 1 shows, the emotional actions, states and processes detected by semantic tagging followed similar overall patterns in the four corpora, but there were interesting

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Table 1. Most frequent word types classified as E3– (violent/angry) in the four corpora (F/100 words). Rank

UKIP 1

UKIP 2

Labour 1

Labour 2

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Attack 0.04 Threat 0.03 Anger 0.03 Barbaric 0.02 Attack 0.02 Brutal 0.02 Force 0.02 Bullied 0.02 Hitting 0.02 Threat 0.02

Abuse 0.06 Attack 0.05 Threat 0.03 Force 0.02 Violence 0.02 Threatening 0.02 Brutal 0.02 Abused 0.01 Furious 0.01 Ferocity 0.01

Threaten 0.03 Threat 0.03 Abuse 0.03 Violent 0.02 Persecution 0.02 Outrage 0.01 Violence 0.01 Threatening 0.01 Cruel 0.01 Revenge 0.01

Attack 0.03 Hit 0.02 Threateni...