Dear Colleagues,

Political communication has undergone important transformations in recent decades. The irruption of the technologies of digital society has substantially modified citizens' consumption of media, establishing a series of distinctive characteristics, including the consumption of multiscreen political information, accelerated by the explosion in the use of social networks; “à la carte” consumption, which coexists with the incidental acquisition of information; and the formation of digital communities. The increase in the consumption of political information and political participation in social networks has generated suitable spaces for the use of emotions in political messages, emotional messages that are fed by the responses of the digital communities to the candidates or their opponents.

This greater emotional charge of political messages occurs simultaneously with the overcoming of the exclusively structural components in the explanation of political phenomena. We begin to pay attention to perceptual, cognitive, and affective elements, leading us to an analysis of the role of communication as a channel and aggregator of our preferences. The generalization of information and communication has provided opportunities for the construction of perceptions, so that citizens perceive selectively, because our perceptions are constructed individually and in community. That perception, which in turn builds individual preference, is conditioned by emotions. Emotions and communication are erected, in this way, as agents for the construction of preferences, both singular preferences and collective preferences, because without communication there could be no collective construction of emotions.

The aim of this Special Issue is to analyze some of the most relevant aspects of the emotional dimension of political communication, paying special attention to the emotional charge of politicians' messages and the responses of their voters, as well as the effects of this emotionality in voting behavior.

We seek to receive papers that employ a wide range of methodologies (i.e., quantitative and qualitative methods). Potential topics include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Emotional messages in social media;
• The use of emotions in political campaign;
• Emotions and engagement;
• Emotions and construction of political communities;
• Government, discourse, and emotions;
• Emotions and electoral behavior;
• Values, democracy, and emotions;
• The emotional polarization of political messages;
• The use of emotions in the discourse of the extreme right.

Prof. Dr. Jose Manuel Rivera Otero
Guest Editor

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• emotions
• political communication
• social media
• engagement
• democracy
• electoral behavior
• political discourse
• affective polarization