What is it about?
Emotions are central to politics, and the body is central to emotional experience, yet we know little about how political emotions are actually felt and represented in the body. This study shows that political emotions, such as political anger, anxiety, depression, disgust, and hope, not only play on our minds but also take on distinct bodily patterns rather than simply mirroring how the same emotions are experienced in everyday life. These patterns shape how people engage with democracy. Using body-mapping methods with nearly 1,000 participants, we demonstrate that these political emotions are embodied differently according to people’s ideology and that they meaningfully predict political participation. Political emotions are therefore deeply embodied and distinctively motivate action, emphasizing the body’s importance for politics and democratic participation.
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Why is it important?
As political developments grow increasingly volatile and dominate our daily attention, the emotions they evoke, like fear, anger, disgust, or hope, do not remain dormant. They are embodied and acted upon in ways that can shape our behavior and the future of democracy. This has real implications for democratic participation, affective justice, and fairness: bodily and emotional responsiveness to politics may not be evenly distributed across society. Recognizing this hidden dimension of political engagement is essential for understanding — and addressing — inequalities in who participates and who gets left out of democratic processes.
Perspectives
We tend to think of political emotions as things people simply think about, like how angry are you on a scale of one to ten. But emotions are so much more than a scale; emotions are felt and lived through the body. We may feel ‘butterflies in our stomach’ or ‘weak in the knees’. We find that politics changes these bodily experiences of anger, anxiety, disgust, depression, and hope. And it is the impact of that embodied experience, not the number someone gives on a survey scale, that may motivate people to participate in politics. Ultimately, our bodies play a part in our politics.
Andrea Vik
Royal Holloway University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Politics embodied: How politics shapes and is shaped by the bodily experience of emotions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2534895123.
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