Political sadness: Democratic institutions and citizens in a depressing world

How can emotions influence our behaviors and perceptions of the political world? For a long time in political science, rational choice models were the bread and butter of studying political decision-making. As these models assume emotionless calculating, minimal work examined the role of emotions in political contexts. In the last 20 years, research on affect has received more attention in political science by focusing on the attitudinal and behavioral effects of emotions on motivated reasoning, political tolerance, and political participation. Although the majority of this work examines the role of enthusiasm, anger, and anxiety, little work systematically examines how sad feelings influence our political decisions—despite the high frequency that US citizens report feeling sad and its powerful influence on behaviors like decision-making, information processing, risk-taking, and attention. This project aims to identify the causes and consequences of political sadness in the U.S. context. I conduct semi-structured interviews with 30 participants from a student subject pool to understand the causes of sadness in politics. I use thematic and narrative analysis to construct a novel theory of political sadness: identifying what political events and actors make people sad, why it makes them feel sad, and their self-reported behaviors that result from feeling sad. I find that knowledgeable citizens tend to be sad about political events, policy issues, and polarization in the US. Participants also report discussing politics less with their family members and friends who disagree with them, reducing their consumption of political media, and increasing their involvement with politics to deal with their sadness. Then, I highlight the positive and negative consequences of sadness for democratic citizenship and institutions. On the negative side, I conduct a laboratory experiment with a political science student subject pool to demonstrate that the political world can induce sadness, which, in turn, can pose negative health costs to politically knowledgeable citizens. More specifically, I demonstrate that sad political materials increase the hedonic consumption of unhealthy foods that can impact physical and mental health. On the positive side, I use a survey experiment to show that sadness is an important mechanism that can influence attitudes and political behaviors about the criminal justice system. I use a cross-sectional experiment on Qualtrics with blocked sampling of White and Black respondents across three conditions: a fictional news story about a Black or White man being killed by police, and a control condition. This suggests that sadness serves as a powerful emotion that mobilizes political participation. Ultimately, sadness is a powerful emotion that significantly shapes political behavior, with its impact being either positive or negative depending on the context and intended outcomes for democracy.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Steur, James Robert

Contributors dc:contributor

• Mondak, Jeffery J
• Gaines, Brian J
• Ksiazkiewicz, Aleksander
• Wong, Cara J

• Political Science
• American Politics
• US Politics
• Sadness
• Emotions
• Political Behavior
• Political Psychology

Statement dc:rights

• © 2025 James Robert Steur

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129682

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129682