Objectivity and measurability

The second reason for the absence of the emotions, somehow related to the modern shifting in attention from passion to interest, is the fact that the focus of the scholarly debates in contemporary political science has been reserved for objective and “objectivable” facts. Emotions, in this context, represent the other face of the coin of the rationalistic tradition on which current investigation is based. It should be noted that the behavioural revolution in the social sciences in the 1960s was an attempt to introduce scientific methods into the study of society. It primarily was an explicit reaction to political philosophy, which was seen to be concerned with normative questions, as well as to institutionalism, which has been seen as lacking theoretical and methodological rigor. This behavioural and empiricist tradition, which played a crucial role in the development of he social sciences, has been influenced by logical and scientific positivism. In ontological terms – which is related to the consideration of the “nature of being” – positivism is

foundationalist: it states that there is a real world independent from the observer. In epistemological terms, positivism believes that phenomena can be explained by their regular and predictable outcomes, objectively understandable. Its focus is upon identifying the causes of social behaviour, and the emphasis is upon explanation. Positivism is concerned with establishing casual relationships between social phenomena and developing explanatory models. (Furlong and Marsh, 2002)

In this context, social sciences show many difficulties in analysing affective dimensions. Political science dominant trends, focusing on the study of the quantitatively and objectively defined behaviour, tend to avoid such dimensions. Moreover, in order to understand what kind of resistance inquiries into emotions meet, it should be underlined the deep resistance that lies in the implicit behaviourism absorbed by many social scientists and their preference for more “objectivable” facts, as incomes, voting, and so forth. In this light, it is worthy to underline the inherently “ephemeral” nature of emotions, which are normally conceived as insufficiently tangible and not subjectable to quantification. This poses major methodological concerns for political and social studies, by no means unimportant: how to approach the study of emotions and how to integrate them into political analysis? As well, how to take into account the role played by their contextual, cultural and discursive dimensions?

Given this context, due to their vague nature of unobservable inner states, emotions are hard to define, hard to operationalize, hard to measure and hard to isolate from other factors – from reason too, as we will stress. Still, in much of the literature, emotions have often been viewed as juxtaposed with rationality, the standard baseline of behavioural expectations. Because emotions can distort rationality – emotional people can become both passive and hyperactive, they say – there is no explanation for emotions and therefore, as the logic goes, it is better to stick to the notion of rationality especially when

it is linked to behaviour. Therefore, despite the growing public consciousness of the importance of emotions in social and political life, within academia the study of the relationship between emotion, power and politics has lagged behind practice.

The reluctance of the social sciences in the study of emotions certainly is something to be explored. Nonetheless, one remark should be made: from the origins of modern and contemporary social and political theorizing to the early 20th century thought, there was ample space for emotions. As noted by Barbalet (2008: 10-13), the explanatory value of emotional categories can be located in the major sociologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave Le Bon, Emile Durkheim, Vilfredo Pareto, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Georg Simmel are some of the more notable European sociologists who regarded emotional categories as important explanatory variables.

For what concerns the 20th century, psychoanalysis had offered the main tool kit for researching the role of emotions in politics (Lasswell, 1960). In fact, this type of analysis has been successful within different intellectual perspectives such as those of Harold Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics (1960) and of Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950) – in the wake of Gustave Le Bon and Freudian influence – before being eclipsed during the following decades. In that context, crowd-based theories dominated protest research until the 1960s. The most influential expression of this pathologizing perspective, Gustave Le Bon (1960) described crowds as impulsive, irritable, suggestible and credulous. Given these traits, crowds are susceptible to the emotional appeals of demagogues. Thus, emotions were considered the driving force for all political action that occurred outside normal institutions, when the normal, reasoning individuals could become angry, violent or unthinking under the influence of a crowd. Most social scientists of the early and mid-twentieth century, including Weber, Durkheim, and Freud accepted

some version of Le Bon’s viewpoint. However, in the second part of the 20th century, emotions were erased from social sciences. Whether due to the influence of the rational choice paradigm or simply a legacy of the enlightenment’s privileging of reason over emotion, the role of emotion in politics has been understudied, despite the clear connection between how people feel and how they act. Indeed, in the 1970s, many scholars in social sciences abandoned the concept of crowd behaviour and investigated collective action, developing resource mobilization theories based on rational actor assumptions. This new thinking postulates that individuals’ inclination to engage in political action as well as to join social movements depends on the material and organizational resources available to them. That is to say, these scholars affirmed political participation or engagement in social movements as rational, and “objectivable” political phenomena. Emotions disappeared from their theoretical models.