Towards a Moral Emotional Antagonism in Political Rhetoric? Our Conclusion

Five years after the chapter by Eran Halperin and Noa Schori-Eyal (2019) that highlighted the importance of moral emotions in political decision-making, scholarly interest in anger, shame, guilt, and pride in political talks increased, with particular attention to the causes and consequences of moral affectivity. It has been confirmed that the evolution of social networking sites goes hand in hand with the spread of moral emotional rhetoric. This virality is usually associated not only with platform affordances but with mezzo and macro-level factors, such as politicised intergroup conflict, polarisation, and the presence of coordinated dis/misinformation efforts (Brady et al., 2023; Simchon et al., 2022; Solovev & Pröllochs, 2023). Walter and Redlawsk (2023) demonstrate that micro-level components matter as well: individual differences in partisan identification and ideological extremity are strong predictors of reacting to moral emotional messages. Double standards are activated by respondents: when people’s party identification aligns with a politician who violates norms, citizens tend to respond with less anger, contempt, disgust, and shame. The probability of sharing moral-emotional messages correlates with the strength of political identity; engaged voters are more likely to share moral-emotional political messages than centrists or those loosely affiliated with parties (e.g., Brady et al., 2020). These findings stimulate renewed fascination in moral politics in general, and affective moralisation in public debates, in particular.