conflict & communication online, Vol. 19, No. 1&2, 2020
www.cco.regener-online.de
ISSN 1618-0747

Thomas Theurer
Raging right-wingers, bleeding-heart liberals and the composed center? – An explorative look on articulations regarding asylum policy with special consideration of emotional aspects of speech

This paper discusses empirical results of a factorial online survey, which uses open and closed answer formats with (emotional) articulations in contrast to asylum policy discourses and human rights orientations. Firstly, the contents of the response texts and the quantitative data on human rights orientation were examined by separate first-order latent class analyses. Second-order latent class analysis revealed four latent positioning patterns with regard to both human rights and asylum policy. The interpretation of these patterns against the background of cognitivist emotion theories and radical democracy theory approaches reveals that the quantity of expression of emotions with negative valence is not a genuine characteristic of right-wing populist articulations. For further research on political emotions, more attention should be paid to the directionality of emotional speech.

The author: Thomas Theurer, MA, is university assistant and PhD student at Salzburg University, Department of Educational Research. Research interests: political education, educational migration research, socio-scientific research on emotions.
eMail: thomas.theurer@sbg.ac.at