Szabó, Gabriella and Ring, Orsolya and Beichelt, Timm and Lipiński, Artur (2026) Pride and Hubris in European Parliament Campaigns. The cases of Germany, Hungary, and Poland in 2019 and 2024. Working Paper. MORES Working Paper Series, 4. (Unpublished)
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Abstract
This paper examines how pride operates as a strategic emotional resource in political communication during the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament election campaigns in Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Drawing on the MORES project’s analytical framework, it investigates how political actors deploy pride to mobilise supporters, affirm group identity, and shape public discourse within increasingly polarised political environments. Using a finetuned XLM-RoBERTa model, the Emotions9 Babel Machine https://emotions9babel.poltextlab.com/ trained on expert-labelled and GPT-generated data, the study identifies sentence-level pride expressions in Facebook posts published by parties and politicians ten weeks prior to each election. The pride classifier achieved over 70% accuracy across three languages, enabling a robust cross-national comparison. The findings reveal sharp contextual contrasts. In Hungary, pride-driven posts consistently generated higher audience engagement, indicating that positive moral-emotional appeals resonate strongly within an affectively polarised public sphere. In Germany, by contrast, neutral informational posts elicited more engagement than pride expressions, suggesting a political communication culture that rewards rational clarity over emotionalisation. Poland occupies an intermediate position: pride expressions were moderate in frequency yet produced stable engagement, reflecting a more pluralistic but emotionally calibrated campaign environment. Overall, the analysis demonstrates that pride is widely used but functions differently across political systems. While it can strengthen collective identity and sustain mobilisation, pride may also shade into hubris, reinforcing perceptions of moral superiority and sharpening political antagonism. The study highlights the need for further qualitative research to distinguish authentic pride from hubristic communication and to understand how emotional narratives travel across diverse European political contexts.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Working Paper) |
|---|---|
| Title in English: | Pride and Hubris in European Parliament Campaigns. The cases of Germany, Hungary, and Poland in 2019 and 2024 |
| Keywords in English: | Moral Emotions, European Parliament Campaigns, Large Language Models, Elections |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General) |
| Divisions: | Institute for Political Science |
| Research funder: | European Union (EU), MORES project, grant no. 101132601 |
| Depositing User: | Enikő Meiszterics |
| Date Deposited: | 31 Mar 2026 06:02 |
| Last Modified: | 31 Mar 2026 06:02 |
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| URI: | https://openarchive.tk.mta.hu/id/eprint/662 |
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