We love, they hate: Emotions in affective polarization and how partisans may use them

Abstract

What emotions do affectively polarized individuals report, and how? While affect is a broad term, research suggests that different emotions predict distinct political behaviors. Therefore, it is vital to understand what emotions partisans report. However, as research on motivated reasoning suggests that people process information consistent with their partisan mind, I argue that they may not necessarily report the emotions they feel. Instead, they may ascribe normatively desirable emotions to their ingroup and normatively undesirable emotions to opposing outgroups. Doing so makes their ingroup distinct from and superior to outgroups. This article develops and showcases this argument. I analyze data in which affective polarization was likely high—interviews with radical‐right voters conducted before a major election—to illustrate what emotions partisans report and how. The discussion invites future research to test how affective polarization correlates with single emotions and whether partisans strengthen polarization by how they talk about emotions.