Protecting collective worth: pride in European parliament campaigns in Germany, Hungary, and Poland

Szabó, Gabriella and Ring, Orsolya and Lipiński, Artur and Beichelt, Timm (2026) Protecting collective worth: pride in European parliament campaigns in Germany, Hungary, and Poland. Frontiers in Political Science, 2026 (8). ISSN 2673-3145

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Abstract

Introduction: This article examines how pride functions as an emotional resource of protective politics in European Parliament election campaigns in 2019 and 2024. Focusing on Germany, Hungary, and Poland, we analyse how political actors deploy pride-related textual cues in Facebook campaign discourse to affirm collective worth and symbolically defend the worth of the political community in increasingly contested public spheres. Methods: Using a fine-tuned multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model trained on expert-labelled and GPT-generated data, we identify sentence-level pride expressions in Facebook posts published during the ten weeks preceding each election. The classifier achieves accuracy levels above 70% across three languages, enabling large-scale cross-national comparison. Results: The findings reveal substantial contextual variation in both the distribution and audience responsiveness to pride. Pride is not systematically structured by parties’ electoral status: both re-elected and newcomer parties may deploy it, although by 2024 its use becomes more selective, with a moderate tendency to concentrate among re-elected actors. The relationship between pride and user engagement is uneven. In Hungary, differences between pride and non-pride posts remain negligible. In Germany, the association is unstable across election cycles. Poland shows the clearest shift, where pride-related posts generate significantly higher engagement in 2024. Discussion: These results indicate that pride is not an inherently mobilising campaign emotion, but a context-dependent communicative resource. Pride can function as a resource of collective worth protection by reaffirming achievement, resilience, and moral standing, yet its effectiveness depends on communicative context and audience responsiveness.

Item Type:	Article
Title in English:	Protecting collective worth: pride in European parliament campaigns in Germany, Hungary, and Poland
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:	09 Jun 2026 17:03
Last Modified:	09 Jun 2026 17:03
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URI:	https://openarchive.tk.mta.hu/id/eprint/669

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