Politics of Feelings: Emotional Expression and Legislative Effectiveness in the U.S. Congress

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.10198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Emotions are a pervasive feature of political communication, yet existing research has focused primarily on describing patterns of emotional expression rather than examining whether they are associated with consequential legislative outcomes. We address this gap by investigating the expression and correlates of discrete emotions in more than 1.7 million speeches delivered in the U.S. Congress between 1973 and 2024. Using a transformer-based emotion