✍🏻 Over the last year, I have conducted 36 semi-structured interviews with Austrian politicians in two waves: The emotional capital available to them is causal to their position of power in the political field, as ones with low capital tend to drop out of politics or remain in backbench positions

💡 Drawing on the Bourdesian concept of emotional capital, I argue that political actors first need to learn and acculturate the emotional "rules of the game" to use this embodied knowlegde later in election contexts

🔮 in the upcoming months we will conduct semi-structured interviews with both politicians and journalists to identify those emotional communities in everyday practice and interactions.

(5/5)

🫂 by zooming in (and out) we can make sense of the chaos of communities, structures and characteristics (such as temporality, spatiality, density, or stability) within each community, as well as the turmoil of actors who have to juggle multiple feeling rules at the same time.

(4/5)

🆕 we propose focusing on the emotional communities in which actors from both sides are placed. as actors can be (and probably always are) members of mulitple, overlapping, sometimes opposing emotional communities, this allows us to get a better picture of actors' positions within the field.

(3/5)

ℹ️ current research on emotions in political journalism sometimes seems to be stuck in dichotomies, seperating rationality/objectivity from emotionality or treating both politics and journalism as seperable institutions.

(2/5)