Power of Emotions: On the Affective Constitution of Political Struggle

The emergence of political identities and communities in (social) media is largely driven by affective responses to current events—a tendency facilitated by the dominance of emotionally and visually oriented communication. However, this mode of community formation leads, first, to the inherent instability and transience of these groups and, second, to the oversimplification of complex socio-political issues into binary, yes/no alternatives. Within this framework, deliberation and argumentation-b