Nicolas Demertzis

Emotions and Populism

It is strange to think that the political sociology of emotions is quite immature when compared with the enormous growth of the sociology of emotion over the last 25 years or so (Kemper, 1990, 1991; Barbalet, 1998; Williams, 2001). Scholars have only recently brought emotions back in the analysis of social and political movements, power relations and institutions (Goodwin, Jasper and Polletta 2001; Holmes, 2004; Ost, 2004; Marcus, 2002; Berezin, 2002). Even so, a robust political sociology of emotions is far from being to the fore. I could make a claim analogous to a statement made by Jack Barbalet (2002, p. 6) with regard to the sociology of emotions: even before the advent of the term, the political sociology of emotions, the centrality of emotion and the role of particular feelings in politics had been recognized. The marginalization of emotions and feelings1 in political sociology up to now is in a large degree the result of: (a) the stripping of the dimension of passion from the political because it was associated with romantic and utopian conceptions unrelated to the modern public sphere as well as because of the more or less instrumental and neutral-procedural conception of politics, a popular view at the end of the 1960s as well as today (Habermas, 1970; Mouffe, 2000); (b) the supremacy of ‘interest’ as opposed to ‘passion’ as an explaining factor of political action, already in effect in the middle of the eighteenth century (Hirschman, 2003); (c) the dominance, for many years, of the rational choice paradigm in a very large number of political science departments in the USA and Europe, in the context of which emotions are either conceived as irrational elements or taken as objective traits which do not affect the actor’s, by definition, ‘rational’ thinking (Barbalet, 1998, pp. 29ff; Williams, 2001, pp. 15–16); and (d) the mistreatment of emotions even in the political culture paradigm, the great rival of rational choice (Barry, 1970; Eckstein, 1988), due to the prevalence of quantitative methodologies according to which the affective dimension has been shrunken into a numeric item or variable.

Politics and Citizenship in Greece: Cultural and Structural Facets

Greek political culture, i.e., the attitudes and behavior of Greek citizens, differs considerably from the mainstream West European participatory type of political culture. This difference, which may be understood as a paradox compared with the ideal typical interpretative model of modernity, results from certain formal and substantive particularities as far as the capitalist system, social coherence in general, and the composition of democracy are concerned. Since the labor market has been poorly developed in Greece, the grammar of social relationships is not structured by systemic rationality and normativity. As a consequence, legitimation is worked out in social spaces that lie outside of the typical institutional context. This peculiarity is grounded on a special articulation among (a) the historical-structural parameters (macro-analytical level), (b) the formation of the capitalist market in Greece and the organization of Greeces political system (meso-analytical level), and (c) policy implementation and everyday political behavior (microanalytical level). Apart from dealing with the Greek case, these proposed three levels of explanation may be applied to other cases as a more general comparative model.

Media and Nationalism: The Macedonian Question

As divisive political ideologies in the era of globalizatin, contemporary nationalisms differ considerably from the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nationalisms. They are fueled by the worldwide antinomy between the global and the local. Because nationalism is rooted deeply in different political cultures, nationalist biases affect the way journalists and media organizations select and present news stories about national collective identities and the national “others.” However, it is legitimate to expect that supranational developments will redirect selection criteria of news coverage toward a less parochial and more responsible attitude on the part of the press. In this article, an effort is made to examine the positions of fourteen leading Greek newspapers, taking as a point of departure an earlier study on the Macedonian question and expanding it to include the interim accord between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. It is argued that in comparison to the past, we see an important alteration of the normative framing of the articles, from an ethnocentric to a polycentric approach. However, an analysis of the results also demonstrates that this shift does not reflect a deeper and permanent change in the nationalistic attitude of the Greek newspapers on the Macedonian question.

Feeling the Greek Financial Crisis

Since 2010 Greece has been undergoing a severe socio-economic crisis which has affected everyday life in a multitude of ways. Media reportage has generally interpreted and represented these crisis effects through a negative emotional discourse that includes conditions of anger, rage, wrath, anxiety, fear, threat, distrust and depression. Although these terms are mediatizations of what people actually feel, they provide an anecdotal index of the multifaceted emotional responses of Greek citizens to the financial crisis.

Youth, ethnicity, and a ‘reverse digital divide’ A study of Internet use in a divided country

Internet use among young people in multicultural societies is differentiated according to socioeconomic and cultural factors, one of which is their ethnic background. This study is concerned with the unreported case of Cyprus – the last divided country in Europe, with most Greek Cypriots living in the south and most Turkish Cypriots living in the northern part of the island. The study explores two main questions: First, are online experiences of young people in Cyprus shaped by socioeconomic factors, such as gender, education, and income? Second, is ethnicity a defining factor regarding the kinds of activities young people undertake online? Analysis of data obtained by a representative sample survey of about 350 young adult Cypriots aged 18–24 in both communities suggests the existence of a ‘reverse digital divide’, as the more disadvantaged community engages more often in expression, association, and learning online. This finding provides support for the diversification hypothesis that suggests a compensatory or remedial use of the Internet by disadvantaged youths.

Introduction: Theorizing the Emotions-Politics Nexus

Prompted by interdisciplinary work on emotions, this book critically addresses the politics-emotions nexus at both a mass and an individual level with a specific focus on cases of political tension. Substantive areas of interest include transitions to post-communism, the ‘Arab Spring’, the Greek crisis and nationalist and xenophobic practices in different EU countries. In addition, the book is concerned with the variety of ways emotions shape, and are shaped by, social movement actors, the contested nature of civil society and public opinion, the potential protest created by humiliation and shame and the management of emotions practiced by key figures in international politics.

The Greek Green voter: environmentalism or protest?

The results achieved by the Ecologists-Greens (EG) between 2007 and 2009 represented the strongest ever electoral performance of any Greek ecological party. Was the rapid electoral rise of the Greek Green party a product of growing public concern about the environment after the destructive 2007 forest fires, or the result of a partisan dealignment in the Greek political system? A quantitative analysis of the demographic, behavioural, and attitudinal dimensions of the Green vote demonstrates that while environmental concerns played a role in the EGs performance, so too did discontent with the programmes of the traditional forces of the three-pole political system. This left the EG vulnerable to the polarisation of political forces in the second election of 2012.

Collective fear and societal change

Political tensions are immersed in emotions of every kind: primary, secondary, tertiary, moral, negative, positive, self-targeted, other-directed and so on. It is impossible to discern and describe their entirety, as affectivity is inseparable from every aspect of political activity, in spite of the misrecognition of this link on the part of academic political analysis over the last decades or so. Prominent among the emotions of political significance is fear, a basic or primary emotion which has been studied by philosophers, psychologists, sociologists and political scientists. Of the voluminous scholarly and lay literature, this chapter addresses three common assumptions: first, fear is an individual reaction to physical or even socio-political threat; second, fear is exclusively an emotion of those in subordinate or weak positions or roles; third, fear is experienced as introjected or extrojected, corresponding respectively to behaviours of flight or fight, subjugation or rebellion.

Political Action and Resentful Affectivity in Critical Times

How does the study of emotions help us understand engaging in or abstaining from violent and illegal political behaviors in the context of the Eurozone economic crisis? This question sits at the core of our article. We focus particularly on anger, fear, and hope hypothesizing that combined with perceptions of self-efficacy, these emotions fuse in complex affective blends of resentful or ressentiment-ful affectivity, which in turn determine the path of citizens’ political engagement. We test this using data from a three-wave cross-sectional survey from Greece, which contains measures of emotions and unique items of engagement with illegal and violent political actions. We show that such behaviors rest on complex clusters of resentful affectivity pointing to particular actions and reactions. Our theoretical and empirical framework can be useful for understanding political developments outside Greece manifested as grievances, anti-immigration demands, anti-establishment sentiment, anti-expert skepticism, and support for populist parties, extending previous theoretical and empirical work, which currently employ discrete measures of emotions.