Central European Journal of Communication

ABSTRACT: Appealing to fear was widely believed to be a rhetorical strategy behind the last decade’s successes of populists. Recent empirical studies, however, show that this perception has been oversimplified. highlighting that emotional appeals are frequently used by politicians across the spectrum and that their distribution is shaped by multiple factors. Our study contributes to this field by introducing another dimension: proximity to war. We hypothesize that politicians in countries bordering a militarily aggressive neighbor would aim to evoke different emotions than their peers running for office in countries distant from it. To validate this hypothesis, we employed a Large Language Model (GPT-4) to assess emotional appeals in pre-election debates in six European countries (Estonia, Poland, Finland, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands). Our results confirm that appeals to fear dominate debates in countries close to conflict, while appeals to anger prevail in those more distant from it. Consequently, studies on populism and political communication in general, should consider conflict proximity as a crucial variable.

Full text: https://journals.ptks.pl/cejc/article/view/725/pdf