Brexit and the Everyday Politics of Emotion: Methodological Lessons from History
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720911915 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Author | Jake Watts,Jonathan Moss,Emily Robinson |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
911915PSX0010.1177/0032321720911915Political StudiesMoss et al.
research-article2020
Article
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(4) 837 –856
Brexit and the Everyday Politics
© The Author(s) 2020
of Emotion: Methodological
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Lessons from History
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720911915
DOI: 10.1177/0032321720911915
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Jonathan Moss1 , Emily Robinson1
and Jake Watts2
Abstract
The 2016 European Union referendum campaign has been depicted as a battle between ‘heads’
and ‘hearts’, reason and emotion. Voters’ propensity to trust their feelings over expert knowledge
has sparked debate about the future of democratic politics in what is increasingly believed to be
an ‘age of emotion’. In this article, we argue that we can learn from the ways that historians have
approached the study of emotions and everyday politics to help us make sense of this present
moment. Drawing on William Reddy’s concept of ‘emotional regimes’, we analyse the position of
emotion in qualitative, ‘everyday narratives’ about the 2016 European Union referendum. Using
new evidence from the Mass Observation Archive, we argue that while reason and emotion are
inextricable facets of political decision-making, citizens themselves understand the two processes
as distinct and competing.
Keywords
Brexit, emotion, everyday politics, Mass Observation, history
Accepted: 10 February 2020
Introduction
Politics seems to be becoming increasingly emotional. In a context of 24-hour news
cycles and social media, we are told that instant reaction takes precedence over consid-
ered judgement (Davies, 2018). Citizens are thinking fast when they should be thinking
slow (Kahneman, 2011). People are trusting their feelings and emotions instead of evi-
dence and facts (Crouch, 2017). These narratives circulate in mass media (e.g. Blair,
2016; Gorvet, 2016; RC, 2019), intensifying the perception that we are living through an
‘Age of Emotion’ (e.g. BBC Radio 4, 2018). Feelings of anger, fear, nostalgia and resent-
ment are understood to be particularly powerful and disruptive for established democratic
1University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
2Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Jonathan Moss, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RH, UK.
Email: j.moss@sussex.ac.uk
838
Political Studies 68(4)
norms. Indeed, supporters of Donald Trump, Brexit and nationalist parties across Europe
are often perceived to be drawing upon these negative feelings in place of expert knowl-
edge (Crouch, 2017; Kluger, 2016; Rachman, 2016). This growing reliance on emotions
is generally understood to have negative consequences for the health of democracy. As
well as being associated with nativist attitudes and support for populist parties, the
strengthening of citizens’ emotional attachments to group identities reduces opportunities
for collaboration and compromise and increases intolerance and political cynicism
(Hobolt et al., 2018; Iyengar et al., 2019).
The European Union (EU) referendum campaign was frequently described in emo-
tional terms, as a conflict between reason and resentment, fear and hope, heads and hearts.
In its aftermath, commentators worried that voters had abandoned rationality in favour of
passion (e.g. Hewitt, 2016). Such interpretations caused a dilemma for political scientists,
used to explaining the decline of voters’ partisan attachments to parties in terms of the
triumph of rational modes of behaviour – particularly voting on valence issues, such as
party competence (Clarke et al., 2004; Dalton and Wattenberg, 2002; Sarlvik and Crewe,
1983). As John Curtice (2018) put it:
Brexit has stirred up a degree of political passion of which, in the wake of the long-term decline
in the strength of party identification, voters had long since seemed incapable. Perhaps the
decline in party identification has always been more a consequence of a growing inability of
parties to secure the affection, loyalty and commitment of voters than, as widely assumed, the
emergence of a more rational, sceptical electorate that was no longer willing to invest emotionally
in a political party or cause.
Yet, this is not as novel as recent discussions would suggest and Brexit is certainly not
the first time public debate has invoked the binary between emotion and rationality.
Abortion and capital punishment are examples of issues framed in similarly emotional
terms from earlier periods of British political history (Brooke, 2011; Langhamer, 2012).
Within political science, an ‘affective turn’ has been underway since at least the early
2000s (Hoggett and Thompson, 2002, 2012; Prior and van Hoef, 2018). Individuals’
inherent emotional dispositions have been used to explain their attachment to opinions,
identities and political parties, alongside their immediate emotional reactions to circum-
stances and events (Marcus, 2000). Where political scientists had previously contrasted
affective cues (feelings) to cognitive cues (thoughts), greater attention has recently been
paid to the interaction between feelings and thoughts, in understanding how affective
mood mediates our judgements. Indeed, contrary to popular interpretations of the EU
referendum, Marcus (2003) observes a shift from the conventional wisdom that the intru-
sion of affect into decision-making undermines rational consideration (Janis and Mann,
1977), to a more functional view of emotion that serves as a helpful heuristic for context-
contingent decisions.
While political scientists have become increasingly aware of the role of emotions in
political life, they have tended to treat them as stable signifiers of easily recognised experi-
ences. Most studies of emotion rely on either large scale public opinion surveys to aggre-
gate and explain the relationship between feelings and individual attitudes (e.g. Miller,
2011), or survey experiments to observe their impact on micro-level political behaviour
(e.g. Huddy et al., 2015). Such methods allow scholars to make generalised knowledge
claims, but they are less good at reflecting the ‘unruliness and unpredictability’ of feelings,
or their capacity to circulate between individuals, among groups and throughout popula-
tions (Ahmed, 2004; Hoggett and Thompson, 2012: 3; Jupp et al., 2016).
Moss et al.
839
Political sociologists have begun to address these concerns by examining the social
context of emotions and analysing individuals’ emotional experiences. Kleres and
Wettergren (2017) show how specific emotions, such as fear, hope and guilt, motivate and
orient the strategies of climate activists; Holmes (2004) demonstrates the ambiguous
effects of anger in feminist politics; Manning and Holmes (2014) stress the role of affinity
in shaping people’s interpretations of politicians and political parties. Yet, while these
accounts examine the political effects of specific emotions and show how emotional
norms are negotiated in different ideological contexts, they cannot tell a wider story about
the changing role of emotion in public life. In order to do this, we need to understand how
people experience their own emotions and those of others, how they weigh the idea of
‘emotion’ against that of ‘reason’ and how these feelings-about-feelings fit into the stories
they tell about politics. We must, therefore, listen to citizens’ own voices as they describe
and narrate the everyday politics of emotion.
In this article, we argue that we can learn from the ways that historians have approached
the study of both emotions and everyday politics. From historians of emotion, we take our
concern for the specificities of emotional norms, or ‘regimes’ (Reddy, 2001), in different
historical contexts. From historians of everyday politics comes our interest in ‘vernacu-
lar’ modes of understanding (Lawrence, 2019), which treat citizens as experts in their
own lives, and pay close attention to how they narrate their experiences, via close reading
of archival sources. We use new evidence from the Mass Observation (MO) Project to
examine the complex ways in which emotions featured in citizens’ reflections on the
Brexit debate and on their own decision-making processes. We read this material for evi-
dence of the vernacular understandings of the role of emotion in public life in the specific
context of the referendum, and use this to reflect on the wider emotional regimes within
which such accounts are produced.
Two contradictory storylines emerge from these sources. On the one hand, respondents
asserted that they were happy to rely on their emotions – their ‘gut feeling’ – as an apoliti-
cal source of knowledge, in a context in which other sources of information could not be
trusted. On the other, they condemned emotional voting by others as uninformed, unedu-
cated, deluded, sentimental, irrational and thoughtless. We show that while much of the
emotion in these accounts was produced socially, in the interactions between citizens and
communities, it was understood to be personal and individual. This perception of private-
ness meant emotions were simultaneously understood as a dangerously irrational and
selfish element in public life and also markers of political authenticity and steadfastness.
These contradictory popular understandings of the role of emotion in political decision-
making have important implications for normative arguments about the need for more
‘rational’, ‘slow-thinking’ in contemporary democracies. Not...
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