Are Emotions Key to Political Engagement? The Case of Environmental Mitigation

Emotions are widely taken to play an important role in motivating political engagement. Activists and scholars often emphasize emotional responses such as fear, indignation, hope, and compassion as central drivers of political views and actions. This paper examines how the relation between emotion, evaluation, and motivation should be understood by drawing on research in the affective sciences and focusing on the case of environmental mitigation. I critically assess a tempting interpretation according to which emotions cause agents to perceive political values and motivate them to act in ways they would not otherwise perceive or do. Based on recent psychological theories of how emotions are elicited, I argue that this interpretation mislocates the order of explanation: roughly, we undergo emotions because we perceive values and are motivated to act, rather than the other way around. This casts doubt on certain ambitious expectations about the causal power of emotions in political engagement. I nevertheless argue that emotions can play important roles in political engagement. I highlight two such roles: emotions as amplifiers of pre-existing evaluations and motivations, and emotions as powerful signals of these evaluations and motivations.