Central European Journal of Communication

ABSTRACT: Digital political campaigns increasingly use discomfort to hold the audience’s attention. Albania’s 2025 parliamentary elections illustrate this pattern. Cringe functions here as a form of emotional manipulation, drawing on theories of awkwardness, emotional governance, and political spectacle (Dahl, 2018; Deleuze, 1992; Debord, 1994). The Cringe Intensity Index (CII) measures this strategic awkwardness. The index was applied to campaign content from five political figures (N = 5) and 127,000 public comments collected during the official campaign period. Higher cringe intensity was associated with higher engagement (r = 0.79) and stronger electoral outcomes (ρ = 0.90). Campaign content built on false intimacy, symbolic dehumanization, exaggerated emotionality, and cultural misalignment was repeatedly amplified by platform algorithms. The method offers a replicable way to measure emotional manipulation in political communication. It also documents the growing role of emotional discomfort in platform-mediated politics.

Full text: https://journals.ptks.pl/cejc/article/view/1046/pdf