Emotional Politics on Facebook. An Exploratory Study of Podemos' Discourse during the European Election Campaign 2014

The results of the European elections 2014 in Spain were characterized by the outstanding rise of a new party, Podemos, which obtained five seats in the European Parliament, despite being founded few months before the elections. The present study analyzes both the content and the presence of emotions in Podemos' discourse on Facebook during the European electoral campaign. In particular, the affective content of both the party's discourse and the comments of its followers will be analyzed through a pragmatic linguistic approach applied to a corpus of 163 posts and 215 followers' comments. Results show an insistence on positive emotions in the party's discourse and a prevalence of negative emotions in the comments of the citizens.