Political Claimsmaking and Emotional Expression

Research on emotional stimuli in politics often overlooks how citizens use emotion when engaging politicians. We begin to address this gap in the literature by examining the relationship between frames, emotion, and sentiment in individual claimsmaking. Our analysis proceeds in two steps. First, we use Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to classify sentiment and frames in 153,288 emails sent to Governor Jeb Bush about the Terri Schiavo case. We find that the religious frame increases the likelihood that an email is positive, while the legal and medical frames lower that likelihood. Then, we qualitatively analyze 999 randomly chosen emails from the corpus to understand how individuals use emotions in their claimsmaking. We find that individuals use emotion to modify frames in ways that signal their understanding of a target’s authority relative to other actors. Individuals used positive emotions with the religious frame to signal their approval of Bush’s actions. In contrast, individuals used negative emotions with the legal frame to convey their disapproval of other actors, such as Terri’s husband, who were seen as misusing their authority and endangering Terri’s life. We conclude with a discussion of how scholars might better understand the role of emotion in individual claimsmaking.