Love and Anger in Global Party Politics

Facebook Reactions to Political Party Posts in 79 Democracies

Abstract

The reactions feature of Facebook provides an opportunity to explore emotional responses to political messages across the globe on a common platform. In this article, we describe this new measure and present a dataset of over two million posts from the Facebook pages of 690 political parties in 79 democracies. We study Love and Angry reactions to these posts, their potential use as measures of emotional response, and party-level variation in the frequency of these reactions.  We find that parties receive systematically different proportions of Love and Angry reactions depending on their ideology, party family, and populist orientation. More extreme parties tend to elicit relatively greater emotional responses. Nationalist, populist, and right-leaning parties in particular elicit a higher proportion of Angry reactions and emotional polarization.