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The Emotional Deficit in Political
Communication
BARRY RICHARDS
Published online: 24 Jun 2010.
To cite this article: BARRY RICHARDS (2004) The Emotional Deficit in Political Communication,
Political Communication, 21:3, 339-352, DOI: 10.1080/10584600490481451
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339
Political Communication, 21:339–352, 2004
Copyright  Taylor & Francis Inc.
ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online
DOI: 10.1080/10584600490481451
The Emotional Deficit in Political Communication
BARRY RICHARDS
As a consequence of social changes which have weakened the boundaries between
different spheres of life, politics is now interwoven with popular culture. This means
that we now seek certain kinds of emotionalized experience from politics. The relationship
of people to politics has changed, and has come more fully to resemble a
mode of consumption. While this consumerization of politics has been much described
(and criticized), its implications for the place of emotion in political communications
have not been explored. From a base in the sociology of emotion, this
article undertakes such an exploration. It notes how some analysts of political communication
have already registered the influence of emotional states, and stresses
how contemporary emotionality differs from traditional conceptions of the emotional
as a domain separable from rationality and as an optional button for message strategists
to press. The complexity and omnipresence of emotional states is emphasised.
Political advertising is taken as one area where a sophistication of messages to
match the complexity and power of audience emotions might have been expected to
develop, but does not appear to have done so yet to a great extent. Making good
this “emotional deficit” in political communications is not primarily a way for particular
parties or candidates to gain electoral advantage (though it could be that),
but is essential for the regeneration of the democratic process and the creation of a
more viable settlement between reason and emotion in contemporary society.
Keywords emotion, emotionalization, leadership, political advertisements, popular
culture, sociology of emotion
One contribution that sociology can make to the study of political communication is to
identify broad social and cultural changes which are influencing the democratic process
and so are likely to have effects on political communication. This impact may be indirect,
via changes in the societal context within which communications take place, or more direct,
by affecting the aims or content of communications. Some recent work in sociological
research and theory has focused on emotion as a previously neglected field of empirical
inquiry (Bendelow & Williams, 1998; Featherstone, 1999; Fineman, 2000; Hochschild,
1983; Jamieson, 1998; Williams, 2000; Wouters, 1992), and sought to establish its centrality
for general sociological theory and for understanding contemporary society (see Lupton,
1998, and Elliott, 2001, for reviews of some of this work, of which important examples
are Bauman, 2003; Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 1995; and Giddens, 1992; the work of Elias,
1939a, 1939b, also offers an important paradigm for the sociological study of emotion).1
Barry Richards is Professor of Public Communication at Bournemouth University.
Address correspondence to Barry Richards, Bournemouth Media School, Bournemouth University,
Fern Barrow, Poole, Dorset BH12 5BB, UK. E-mail: brichards@bournemouth.ac.uk
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340 Barry Richards
This “affective turn” in sociology of course reflects changes in the world outside
academia. Drawing upon the sociology of emotion, this article will argue that a cultural
trend that may be called “emotionalization” has already transformed the context for
political communications, and that the style of many of these communications needs to
be adapted to this new context, with implications for their aims and content.
In summary, the argument is as follows. First, as a consequence of social changes
which—as a key feature of the “postmodern”—have weakened the boundaries between
different spheres of life, politics is now interwoven with popular culture. By this, I mean
that modes of engagement and judgment which characterize our experience of popular
culture are now increasingly applied to our experience of politics, though our awareness
of this development and of its implications for political communication is as yet limited.
Second, since popular culture is substantially about feeling, about the expression
and management of emotion (Richards, 1994; Elias & Dunning, 1986), the incursion
into political experience of the values of popular culture means that we now seek certain
kinds of emotionalized experience from politics that we have not done in the past. This
can have one of two consequences. Either politics, and particularly the communication
of politics to the public, begins to offer more of these experiences in tune with the
concerns of popular culture, or it becomes increasingly alien to the preoccupations of
the majority of the public, and the democratic deficit grows.
The democratic deficit has been the object of much commentary and analysis in
recent years. Here it is understood as a growing disinterest in or distaste for politics, and
is seen to be in part a function of an emotional deficit in political communications—that
is, the failure of these communications to satisfy the contemporary taste for certain
kinds of affective experience. The revitalization of democracy therefore requires that the
everyday business of political debate at all levels, and of presenting politics to the public,
acquires something of the emotionally compelling narratives offered by, for example,
television soap operas.
To the objection that democracy should be a rational contest, and that emotionality
is antithetical to a balanced and mature political process, there is a simple rejoinder
(though following it through in practice may be very complex). This is that much contemporary
psychology, and much common sense, recognizes that far from being an
oppositional dichotomy, the relationship between feeling and reason is one of deep interconnection
and complementarity. To invite emotional engagement is to facilitate rational
discourse, not to banish it.
Sociologically, this argument posed so far in terms of popular culture can be put in
another way, which is that we inhabit a consumer culture in which there is a cultivated
prominence of feeling (Campbell, 1987; Featherstone, 1991). Forms of social participation
which do not embrace and build on this key feature of contemporary experience
will decline. Marketing—especially advertising—has developed in part as an expertise
in addressing the emotionality of the consumer, often via highly aestheticized imagery,
with the aim of giving goods and services the power to generate strong and attractive
emotional resonance in the public mind. “Political marketing,” if it is to achieve its
ambitions, will need to do the same with politics, both generically for the whole domain
of politics and for the particular “brands” available within it. It is beyond the scope of
this article to go fully into the debates around the idea of “political marketing” (Newman,
1999; Lees-Marshment, 2001), though I will be referring to it, and some of the argument
presented here could be seen as providing a defense of the application of certain
marketing principles to politics.
In the remainder of this article, I (a) expand the argument about the relation be-
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Emotional Deficit in Political Communication 341
tween politics and popular culture; (b) review some examples of recent work that has
begun to identify and explore the question of how political communications must adapt
to an emotionalized culture; (c) discuss the nature of contemporary emotionalization as
it may be reflected in communications, in contrast to traditional message strategies with
“emotional” appeal; (d) illustrate a possible direction for the empirical study of the emotional
content of political communications, noting how psychologically unsophisticated
much political communication typically is at present; and (e) provide some concluding
remarks on the concept of “emotional labor” and its implications for reason in politics.
Politics, Popular Culture, and Emotion
Much recent controversy about political communication has tended to focus around the
nature and consequences of promotional techniques in contemporary politics (e.g., Wernick,
1991; Franklin, 1994; Scammell, 1995; Ansolabehere & Iyengar, 1997; Jones, 1999).
The high profile critiques of spin, media manipulation, and presentational packaging
take us directly to questions about the fundamental nature of politics in the present day.
As Street (1997) has pointed out, they require us to ask about the relationship between
culture and politics. How is politics influenced by culture? It may be suggested that
politics has been influenced by a culture of marketing. In a sense that is true, but this is
too narrow a way of putting it. It is not a case of one specific cultural influence—
marketing or promotionalism—impacting from “outside” on politics as a particular sphere
which, in theory at least, could resist this influence.
Instead, as Ryfe (2001) and Schudson (2001) remind us, politics is culture. It is
therefore a case of broad cultural changes unfolding partly within politics, as in many
other spheres of life. There is an inexorability about this process, because there are
powerful forces driving it. It is carried both by corporate and other social structural
agendas, and also by changes within us as individuals. There are forces for change both
arising spontaneously within particular spheres such as politics and filtering across from
one sphere to another. As one aspect of what is sometimes described as the arrival of
the “postmodern,” the boundaries between different social spheres are much more permeable
than previously, so politics, work, leisure, personal life, and so on are now in
more direct and deep interaction with each other. Technological developments mean that
time and space undergo “compression” (Harvey, 1989) and can no longer separate people
to the extent they did; this underpins the compression (or condensation, to use the Freudian
term) of different cultural and psychic elements into the same social spaces (Richards,
2000).
The broad cultural changes which are transforming politics can be described and
analyzed in various ways. The specific feature to be taken here as a starting point—
because it is assumed to be a fundamental one—is, crudely put, the increasing influence
in politics (though it affects other spheres also) of popular culture (Street, 2001; Dorner,
2003). There are complex drivers of this trend, which I cannot go into here: the proliferation
of mass media; the vigor and creativity of popular culture in areas such as music,
sport, humor, and other forms of entertainment; and perhaps most basically a deep
historical trend toward the democratization of life.
Commonplace illustrations of this influence as it affects politics abound. Political
broadcasts, rallies, sometimes whole campaigns take theme tunes from pop music. There
is nothing surprising or distinctive about this: Pop music is now the soundtrack of life
for most people, omnipresent in public and private spaces. The more televisual the political
process has become, the more “we ‘read’ our politicians through their gestures
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342 Barry Richards
and their faces, in the same way that we read performers on television” (Street, 2001, p.
5). Party political communications make frequent references to images and phrases from
contemporary popular culture (e.g., the U.K. Labour Party outdoor ads from the 2001
general election campaign which satirically likened the Conservative Party to disaster
movies). Overall, the democratic process is now played out on a stage where—alongside
traditional resources from ideology, ritual, and the values of older civic cultures—there
are scripts, actors, and props which could be seen as “borrowed” from popular culture
(though in fact they soon become part of the political fabric itself). So the influence of
culture within politics is a growing one, in the sense that popular culture is increasingly
entering and shaping politics, constituting everyday politics in the content and channels
of political communications, in the dynamics of public opinion, and in the values and
decisions of individual citizens.
From the point of view of individual politicians or parties, this process brings tensions
and possibilities for failure. The song may not be right for some target audiences, or the
stylistic gesture may backfire (as in the derision which greeted the public appearance of
then Conservative Party leader William Hague in a baseball cap). Indeed, it might be
argued, drawing on these negative examples, that popular culture cannot really be infusing
politics as suggested, because if it were then politics would be much more popular than
it is. The problem we face is, after all, the unpopularity of electoral politics.2
This, however, takes us to the main point: The unpopularity of politics can be attributed
in part to the failure of political actors (from national leaders and their advisors
to local activists), and of the professional communicators they work with, to respond
and adapt sufficiently to the ways in which popular culture has now transformed society.
While the experience of citizens has been transformed, the modes of political address to
them have not always matched these transformations. Despite all of the hype about spin
and about politicians’ enslavement to the media, and despite the undoubted energy with
which control of media agendas has been pursued, political communications often remain
unattuned to some key dimensions of this new cultural reality. In particular, there
is an emotional deficit in contemporary political communications, a lack of crafted, sustained
attention to the emotional needs of the audience. There is at best only an implicit
and patchy recognition that popular culture is an emotionalized culture dense with desires
and anxieties.
The popular has always to some extent been a domain of passion, and of emotional
release. There are, however, particular qualities to the present preoccupation with feeling.
It is not a carnivalesque festival of pure expression or catharsis. It is more reflective,
and is as much concerned with the management of feelings as with their expression.
It is therefore better described as a “therapeutic” rather than “emotionalized” culture,
since in its most positive and developed forms it is characterized by reflexivity as
well as by expressivity, by the conjoining of emotion with thought (Richards & Brown,
2002). This is what differentiates it from earlier types of public emotionality. In some
respects, the rise of popular culture has involved a simple or quantitative emotionalization
of everyday life, as may be observed in, for example, aspects of the uninhibited mourning
seen after the death of Princess Diana. But typically this emotionalization is qualitatively
different from earlier forms, and is characterized by particular concerns with acknowledging
and reflecting upon feelings, both in private and in public (e.g., Walker et
al., 1995).3
The distinctive nature of this development can be highlighted if we consider it in
terms of Elias’s theory of the “civilizing process” (e.g., Wouters, 1986). Therapeutic
culture is not a remissive reversal of the increasing restraint placed upon us by the
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Emotional Deficit in Political Communication 343
civilizing trend, but on the contrary a further stage of the internalization of restraint
through the capacities for self-monitoring and self-management which it promotes. The
expressive, disinhibitory aspects which are required for this—and which may sometimes
appear, at least on the surface, to be the major component of the trend—are best thought
of as a “controlled de-controlling,” a psychic loosening necessary in order to build firmer
structures overall.
Empirical evidence for this “therapeutic culture hypothesis” can be sought in a variety
of cultural and sociological data. The most direct and self-sufficient evidence across
the developed world is probably to be found in the rise of the therapeutic professions,
particularly counselling in all of its forms in both private practice and organizational
settings. Studies of changes within other professions such as teaching, medicine, nursing,
and social work would also show the increasing influence overall since the 1960s of
“therapeutic” discourses, as presciently identified by Rieff (1966) and Halmos (1965).
At the same time as the proliferation of professionalized techniques for exploring and
managing emotional life, there has been a rapid growth of media output and social
activity in the areas of self-help, lifestyle, and personal development which is oriented
toward agendas of emotional self-exploration and self-management.
Another set of quantitative indices of the rise of the therapeutic could be derived
from analyses of media content. In the U.K. there has been a self-evident transformation
of broadcast media content in the last two decades, in which action genres have been
almost entirely displaced in the ratings by emotion-led programming with an emphasis
on personal, affective experience, on identity and relationships, as in “soaps,” reality
TV, chat shows, and some studio discussions. Crime, comedy, and drama genres have
remained popular but now typically have characters, scenarios, and plots drawn in emotionally
complex and reflective ways. Quiz shows and sports coverage often have clear
dimensions of psychological interest. Similar trends are evident in print media, where
for example large sectors of the magazine market have developed to cater to these new
sensibilities. While the uses that audiences and readers make of this material have not
yet been extensively researched, there is a prima facie case for stating that emotional
reflexivity now has a premium place in popular culture.
Despite all of these indicators, and the profusion of commentary on these trends,
the coming of the therapeutic is not much acknowledged in political discourse. One
implicit patch of recognition is in the rise of political marketing. As noted earlier, the
development of popular culture is inseparable from the development of consumer culture,
and contemporary emotionalization is both cause and effect of marketing communications.
Despite the influence of some rationalistic models in marketing, most marketers
have always known their audience to be emotional, in the sense of being influenced by
paralinguistic cues and nonrational message content.
It is important to note that this is a matter of human nature, not necessarily of
human weakness. Paying deliberate and systematic attention to factors such as the dress,
demeanor, and general personality image of political figures is a much-derided practice.
It may indeed not be a most edifying contribution to political culture, but it is a recognition
of the importance now of the impression that politicians as persons make on citizens
as persons. Policy alternatives come with persons attached to them, and the public
are quite legitimately interested in the emotional qualities of these persons. At root here
is an old question, that of trust: Can this person be trusted? We now ask this question in
ways informed by psychological understandings, and we seek answers that tell us about
the person as an emotional being. In a promotional culture, there will inevitably be
some overlap or convergence of political campaigning with emotionally oriented marketing
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344 Barry Richards
techniques in the effort to win trust in individual politicians, and this should not be
summarily dismissed as superficial or cynical manipulation.
Pointers to Affect in Political Communications Research
Alongside the developments in sociological theory and cultural analysis which have foregrounded
the “turn to affect,” there have been a number of empirical research studies in
the specific area of political communications which have begun to highlight the emotional
life of the citizen.
A study conducted in the mid-1990s by Rahn and Hirshorn (1999) used the concept
of “public mood” (see also Rahn et al., 1996), which the researchers defined as a “diffuse
affective state that people experience as a consequence of their membership in a national
political community.” They found that exposure in their experimental design to
attack advertising made some children feel less happy and more angry about America,
and that these shifts in “public mood” mediated lower opinions of government. This
effect occurred among children low in “political efficacy,” that is, low in their belief
that government could be influenced by people like themselves. In other words, attack
advertising had detrimental and divisive effects on democratic participation through the
medium of its impact on diffuse emotional states.
Merelman (1998) introduced the concept of “mundane political culture.” This refers
to the ways in which ordinary people spontaneously talk with each other about politics.
Unlike formal political culture in which there are rationally mediated and explicit contests
of ideologies and values involving political institutions, individuals participating in
mundane political culture deal in ideas and statements which are often implicit, hazy,
symbolic, and multivalent in inconsistent and sometimes contradictory ways. Reasoning
is “associative.” This culture is fundamentally emotional. The conversations studied here
were replete with “nostalgia, anxiety, pride, hope, regret and anger” (op. cit., p. 530).
(In fact, Merelman’s account of this discourse sounds close at times to the functioning
of the emotional unconscious as described by psychoanalysts in the concept of “primary
process” [Laplanche & Pontalis, 1973]—as illogical, over-inclusive, and lacking substantive
reference to social realities.)
Merelman despairs of this mundane discourse, seeing it as undermining democracy
by miring people in a disabling ambivalence and muddle, disconnected from institutions
and procedures of effective participation. His prescription is to transform it in the direction
of conventional democratic culture. If, however, we take seriously his observation
that people are emotionally grounded in mundane culture, then we must conclude, first,
that they will not be simply educated out of it, since passions are not that readily
tutored, and second, that it may contain resources for democratic renewal as well as
impediments to it. Our emotional selves support our creative and prosocial endeavors as
well as our defensive and irresponsible tendencies.
In European political communications research, we can also find examples of studies
which register in various ways the emotional nature of contemporary politics and
argue for a need to recognize this in communication practices. Mazzoleni (2000) suggested
that the expressive dimension of political participation has become increasingly
important, and can and does coexist alongside instrumental dimensions of voting
decisions.
Reviewing the political condition of a number of European countries, Mazzoleni and
Schulz (1999) see that this recomposition of the voter as a more “volatile” and emotional
being is driven partly by the decline of political parties. In many Western democracies,
parties are now trusted less than all other political institutions, and although we should not
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Emotional Deficit in Political Communication 345
assume this is completely irreversible, it is probably a long-term trend. It is grounded in
deep social changes, including the rise of the educated and “volatile” voter, and it means
that voting decisions are made on more personalized bases, with the personalities and
emotional qualities of candidates therefore being more important.
Again, it cannot be assumed that this is a one-sidedly negative trend, or one that in
itself cancels out a politics of more traditional values. Mazzoleni and Schulz argue that
while the mediatization of politics (the creation by mass media of the public spheres in
which political debate takes place) does involve some degradations of political discourse,
it has not amounted to a complete subjugation of politics to the media. One could in fact
take a more positive line and suggest that the more thoroughly mediatized our society
and therefore our politics become, the greater the opportunities to reshape and reinvigorate
democracy. This scenario assumes a creative approach to political communication
which would redefine politics, not in opposition to the domains of the personal and
emotional but as overlapping with them and in fruitful exchange with them.
So there are various ways in which political communications research has begun to
register the growing importance of the affective dimensions of politics, whether in the
form of diffuse affective states in the public mind, emotionalized forms of political
discourse, or the individual personalities of political actors. Moreover, there have been
broader theoretical moves in political psychology to focus on emotion. Goodwin et al.
(2001) assemble a collection of essays looking at diverse case studies in “social movement”
politics: AIDS activism, Gdansk in 1980, the Christian New Right, and so forth.
Using a social constructionist approach related to that of Hochschild (1983), they argue
for the crucial importance of theorizing the emotional dimensions of these movements if
we are to understand their internal dynamics and their impact. Marcus et al. (2000)
propose a theory of “affective intelligence” as an alternative to dominant rational choice
theories of voter behavior. Drawing on advances in neuropsychology, they argue for the
role of anxiety in stimulating attentiveness. Although they see their theory as in the end
complementary to that of rational choice, their work is a further indication that political
communication research will have to address itself to the question of affect if it is to
continue to absorb developments in the social sciences.
Contemporary Emotionalization
An objection to the general argument being developed here is that politicians have always
used emotional appeals, as Aristotle recognized in his analysis of rhetoric. The socalled
“fear appeal” is, for example, a long-established technique of commercial and
political advertising. In their study of television advertising in U.S. presidential campaigns,
Kaid and Johnston (2001) found that emotional appeals were more often dominant
than logical or ethical ones, and that this dominance had not increased over the five
decades they examined.
However, the traditional emotional appeal is not the same as a sophisticated discourse
of emotionality. The former may use images of childhood innocence, human
vulnerability, national pride, strong leadership, and so on, and be deliberately crafted to
“pull the heart strings.” Whether done cynically or not, this approach will have a limited
conception of emotionality, as a transparent and compartmentalized aspect of the human
condition, a known faculty that may or may not be brought into play. A contemporary
discourse of emotionality, however, will involve a different understanding of emotion or
affect and its place in everyday life. Drawing on studies integrating psychodynamic theory
with social theory (e.g., Prager & Rustin, 1993; Brown, 2000; Richards & Brown, 2002),
one can suggest that such a discourse would understand emotion as:
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346 Barry Richards
1. An intrinsic and continuous dimension of human functioning, not an optional or
episodic response—it does not only matter or come to life in moments when it
is explicitly present, as when stimulated by a recognizably “emotional” passage
in a speech or a scene in an advertisement.
2. Complex and multilayered, and at times contradictory and obscure. It is therefore
not always easily observed or understood.
3. Not just expressive or cathartic but also reflexive. As suggested earlier, there is
a tendency to acknowledge and process emotional life. Areas of emotional difficulty,
involving anxiety or conflict, may be confronted and addressed rather
than ignored or denied. In the language of psychotherapy, there is an effort
toward the containment and working through of difficulties, rather than their
suppression or expression through acting out.
4. Increasingly recognized as the ground of self-identity. Emotional narratives about
feelings and relationships (the “soap” formula being a theatrical type of these)
provide the material for contemporary narratives of oneself. Politics also is increasingly
experienced through such narratives, which are constructed around
individual politicians as they are around other public figures (Kline, 1997). These
narratives are psychologically realistic, which means that they include the anxieties,
doubts, conflicts, and dilemmas which are to be found in our everyday
emotional lives.
This list of features, particularly those of reflexivity and containment, indicates some
key differences between present and past forms of emotionality in the culture as a whole,
not just in political messages. The broad cultural changes which are the starting point of
this article can be located roughly in the last three decades, and seen as the unfolding of
trends begun in the 1960s. Historians would, however, want to install a longer-term
picture in which the roots of these trends extend back into earlier centuries. Martin’s
(1981) historical sociology of popular culture, Campbell’s (1987) history of consumerism,
and Gay’s (1998) history of affect all point to Romanticism as the original source
of today’s emotionality. However, the alloying of earlier “sentimental” orientations with
the 20th-century rise of psychology, particularly psychoanalysis and its project of exploring—and,
as far as possible, managing—the life of feeling (Rieff, 1966), has produced
the particular “therapeutic” quality of contemporary culture. Within this culture,
an emotional politics will have strong sensibilities for the feelings of others (as in Zeldin’s,
1994, global picture of the changing affective self), and so be very different from the
rowdily disinhibited forms of emotional political communication practiced, for example,
in the mid-19th century United States (Schudson, 2001).
The ever-present, complex, and reflexive narratives which characterize this culture
will embody all of the major themes of human emotional life, the “great oneiric themes”
as Barthes (1988) calls them in his discussion of the power of advertisements. To identify
and track their presence in messages, communication analysts must then turn to
psychology for help in defining these themes, and face a choice from among the various
models of emotional life produced by different schools of psychology.
Following an eclectic version of psychodynamic theory, for example, we might begin
with the following list of basic themes:
• dependency versus autonomy
• loss and mourning
• gender and sexuality
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Emotional Deficit in Political Communication 347
• authority (including leader-follower relationships)
• rivalry (within and between generations)
• guilt and forgiveness
All communications will draw on these themes, or ones like them, because they are the
stuff of human psyche and culture. We can see such themes as the emotional correlates
or consubstantials of rational politics. There is no suggestion that rational debate should
or will collapse into a politics of irrationality. It is instead a case of engaging with the
roots of political commitments, with our emotional responses to policies and politicians,
and with our emotional needs as we find these dramatized on the political stage.
Inevitably, this argument draws replies that raise the problem of demagogy, which
in liberal-democratic common sense is sometimes equated with emotion in politics. It is
important, then, to emphasize the distinction between the exploitation and manipulation
of feeling characteristic of the demagogue, and the articulation and management of feeling
that is the potential role of the contemporary leader whose communications reach
for containment (see above, and the discussion of emotional labor below). The choice
now is not between democracy and demagogy, but between manipulative and containing
forms of emotionalized rhetoric.
Political Advertisements as Emotional Communications
How might this body of psychosocial theory be applied in the empirical study of political
communications? There is one mode of political communication in which we might
particularly expect to be able to study the emotional content of messages, and indeed
expect to find such content highly developed. This is the political advertisement (including
in this category the U.K. party political broadcasts, though airtime is free for these).
There are traditions of research that take commercial ads seriously as emotional communications,
and the same might apply to political ads. They are highly crafted messages
where the influence of popular and consumer culture within politics is likely to be most
obvious. They also have an importance for democracy, even if they are completely
ineffective as campaign tools. They can be compared to the singing of national anthems
at international soccer matches. This has no known effect on the game’s result, but it is
important for the public experience of the occasion that it is done well. Sung with
passion, the anthems testify to the expression of national identity through the sporting
encounter. Party ads, though they are one-off artifacts, should carry some of the functions
of rituals such as this singing. Preceding the actual moment of contest, they should
enable us to feel a passionate involvement in it and to feel the importance of the political
contest in the life of the nation. Unfortunately, the national anthems now fail to
inspire us to sing—only a few of the players and crowd do it with gusto. And, similarly,
the party ads too often fail to inspire a sense of involvement. To do so, they need to
address themselves more closely and deliberately to the emotional life of the nation.
Nonetheless, emotional themes are often present across whole campaigns. In the
build-up to a campaign, the parties may come to share a basic sense of what the emotional
preoccupations of the public are, and this tacit understanding is then reflected in
what their ad agencies come up with. For example, in the U.K. party election broadcasts
(PEBs) for the 2001 general election, the overarching theme to which a majority of
spots subscribed was leadership. How would an emotionally literate party broadcast
approach the issue of leadership? Some psychosocial analyses (e.g., Hirschhorn, 1998)
would suggest that it would be put together with an eye for the high level of ambivalence
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348 Barry Richards
that is always at the center of our relation to leaders. We crave leadership and the
guidance and protection it promises, but we resent the control that leaders can exert over
us. We want leaders to be people of extraordinary courage and competence, yet we also
want them to be rooted in ordinary life. We need them but envy them. An emotionally
sophisticated communication would try to acknowledge and manage this ambivalence.
Typically, such sophistication was not evident in this set of broadcasts, which tended
instead to offer either homely or grandiose idealizations of leaders. While there are
obvious reasons why a party would not foreground the vulnerabilities or inner conflicts
of its leader, there is a tendency of political ads to deal, with no self-consciousness, in
idealized images of a kind now largely abandoned by the more creative trend setters in
commercial advertising (see, e.g., Goldman, 1992; Leiss et al., 1990; Richards et al.,
2000). While one-dimensional messages such as this may lead some viewers into a
naive or fragile enthusiasm, more are likely to switch channels in boredom or disbelief.
Political communications have to change considerably before they will connect with
audiences that increasingly demand more authentic, playful, and emotionally complex
representations.
Political Communications as Emotional Labor
Of course, it has long been recognized that voters choose leaders on the basis partly of
their personalities, though the older term “character” would for some be a more acceptable
way of stating this. We know that we are presented with choices between candidates
as objects of trust as well as between parties with different policies, and trustworthiness
is a question of individual character. However, this factor of trust is now becoming
increasingly personalized, as alternative bases of trust in party traditions (whether based
in economic interest, ideology, or vague sentiment) become ever weaker.
We now need more than the capacity to trust politicians’ role, since we can rely less
on cultural and institutional role structures (whether patrician, technocratic, democratic,
or whatever). So political leaders have, to an increasing extent, the task of presenting
themselves as persons to be trusted for their intrinsic qualities.
This does not mean that we are at the end of ideology, but that we are amidst a
cultural transformation in which ideology and politics in the traditional sense are becoming
more enmeshed with the personal, with psychological considerations and emotionality.
Emotional qualities are increasingly registered and scrutinized, and judgment
of them is part of the political process. Those involved in communicating with the public
must do so in ways cognizant of the new emotionality.
Traditional political considerations are not now occluded, nor is public life being
asymmetrically invaded by the private and personal. The public is not necessarily degraded,
nor any less capable of participating in a humane and inclusive civic culture.
But traditional separations between domains are no longer viable. There is a compression
together in the same social and psychic spaces of the personal, feeling subject and
the public figure. The personality of the politician is bound up with the policies she
or he represents, and voting is a complex choice between packages of pragmatic, ideological,
and emotional values.
One aspect of this development is that politicians now have a clear and major piece
of “emotional labor” (to use the term introduced by Hochschild, 1983; see also, e.g.,
Smith, 1992) to perform. They must present themselves as individual persons of a particular
emotional makeup, who (to use terminology developed earlier in the study of
group dynamics, as in, e.g., Parsons & Bales, 1955) can offer themselves as social-
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Emotional Deficit in Political Communication 349
emotional, expressive leaders as well as task-oriented leaders. More is demanded of
leaders than previously. They must now be seen as attuned to newly dominant values of
expressivity and spontaneity. But our contemporary cultural concerns are not just with
the expression of emotions but also with the management of emotions. So politicians
must also be seen to offer some containment of the emotions of their public. Like other
social institutions and cultural forms, politics is drawn into the circulation of feelings
and has to contribute to the emotional labor of containing the feelings circulating in the
public domain.
In one sense, this has always been the case; the historical shift is complex, and
leadership has always been an exercise in feeling management, as has sometimes been
apparent (one thinks, for example, of Churchill in the U.K. and Eisenhower in the U.S.).
Now, however, there is pressure to offer such leadership very deliberately. Much effort
is expended in presentation to achieve this, to encompass within it all aspects of the
leader’s life and self, and to ensure that these in turn encompass the relevant therapeutic
agendas in personal philosophy and policy values. Moreover, there is a fundamental
new quality to the emotional role of political leaders. This lies in the much greater
potential for awareness of the emotional dimensions of everyday life, and in the increased
self-questioning and self-examination characteristic of our therapeutic times. Acknowledgment
of error and vulnerability, and honesty about failure and disappointment, for
example, are now more widely recognized as important in the conduct of everyday life,
but are still remarkably rare in the discourse of politicians.
With this awareness comes greater scope for choice, and for the deliberate management
of feelings in certain ways to achieve certain outcomes. Politicians are managers,
not only in the technocratic sense of their management of the national economy but also
in the sense that they (among other public figures) are charged with the management of
massive national reserves of feeling.
To recognize this, and to speak of the possibility that this emotional management
might be conducted artfully, is not to invoke a nightmare of social engineering. As in
small face-to-face groups, and as in organizations, so it is at the level of national culture:
The effective management of emotional dynamics can lead to the development of
supportive and creative relationships, and to a vigorous and enabling democratic ethos.
The argument is not for a rush into “personality politics,” but for the enrichment of
politics with communication practices that carry emotional narratives.
One thing that was new about “New” Labour (Richards, 2000) was the attention
paid to the emotional tasks of political leadership, to intuiting the anxieties of the public
and seeking to respond to them. Some of the emotional attentiveness comes from Tony
Blair’s own self. He is the first U.K. leader with a social self formed during the 1960s,
and so has styles of thought and speech that are attuned to the reflexive and emotionalized
modes of today.4
And some of this attentiveness comes from the much-criticized
practices of communication and image management. Evaluations of these differ, from
left and right condemnations of the cynicism of spin to other, more complex and potentially
favorable assessments. But beneath these arguments we can see wide acceptance
that the political scene is more about emotions and their management than it used to
be, and that politicians and their advisors are intensely involved in certain kinds of
emotional labor, particularly the mass-mediated management of public feeling. This
labor at its best fosters a creative approach to political communication, one that inverts
the 1960s slogan that “the personal is political” and redefines politics as interwoven
with the domains of the personal and wired into the emotional circuitry of popular
culture.
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350 Barry Richards
Notes
1. Also, some developments in the psychology of emotion (e.g., Harre & Parrott, 1996)
have an interdisciplinary outlook, and converge with the sociological work.
2. This unpopularity is often expressed in terms of politics being “boring.” The concept of
boredom is a complex one, but one understanding of what people mean when they say they are
bored is that they are finding something to be without emotional significance for them, and
lacking in scope for identification.
3. There is of course a vigorous debate about the meaning and merits of this trend, and a
recurrent strand of hostile commentary on it (see, e.g., Anderson & Mullen, 1998; Furedi, 2003).
The position implicitly taken in this article is that on balance, it is a positive feature of contemporary
society, though many diverse phenomena are encompassed in this debate and generalizations
should be approached with great care.
4. Unfortunately, the prime minister spoils the approach by referring to “all the personality
nonsense” which he claims is irrelevant to the real business of politics! Blair here bites the
cultural hand that feeds him.
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