(In)visible bonds: Towards a dynamic conceptualisation of emotion in journalist- politician relationships

Abstract

Journalists and politicians are professionally interdependent and closely entangled. Their interactions form fluid communities with shifting boundaries and implicit rules that are strongly shaped by emotion. Yet, journalism studies have rarely conceptualized these affective ties systematically, tending instead to analyse the journalism–politics relationship on an individual or interpersonal level. This paper introduces emotional communities as a framework to understand how shared emotion norms, values, and expressions structure professional relationships between journalists and politicians. Building on and extending existing community concepts – such as interpretive, practice-based, and imagined communities – it highlights the emotional dimension of professional life as both a source of cohesion and conflict. By linking emotions to processes of professional boundary-making, the concept of emotional communities provides an integrated lens for analysing the journalism–politics field. It opens new research avenues along temporal (how emotional dynamics evolve), spatial (how they differ across levels), and methodological (how they can be captured through multi-scalar designs) lines.

Introduction

Journalists and politicians are constantly dancing: Sometimes it is time for a “tango” (Strömbäck and Nord, 2006), or for a more flexible “tango nuevo” (Vobič et al., 2017). It might shift to a “rumba” (Ross, 2010) shortly after, or it results in an uneasy “danse macabre” (Ross, 2010). They sometimes even “dance on their own” if they cannot find a partner (Eriksson and Östman, 2013). Research on the professional relationship between journalists and politicians often employs the metaphor of a dance: With politicians, the dance is characterised by increasingly avoiding or even attacking journalists. For example, they attempt to bypass professional journalism by creating their own or buying well-established media outlets (Kotisova and Waschková Císařová, 2023). Direct attacks on journalism, predominantly from populist politicians, are commonplace (Egelhofer et al., 2021; Panievsky, 2022). Journalists, on the other hand, do not dance as confidently as before – their much-celebrated watchdog role has come under mounting pressure, as it struggles to maintain its cultural authority and institutional trust in the face of political, economic, technological, and societal transformations (Carlson, 2007). Everyday news work is also increasingly precarious and unstable (Kotisova, 2019).

The metaphor of the dance captures the uneasy feelings of taking the first step, awkwardly finding a rhythm, and confidently dancing together. These are all apparent in the journalistic-political field’s daily business and have attracted substantial scholarly scrutiny. Two key aspects are conspicuously associated with dancing but have been largely neglected in research. First, it is usually not just two actors dancing, but a field in which some actors might prefer or avoid others for a dance. Second, while picking a partner for a tango or rumba may initially be a rational or strategic decision, the development of the dance is strongly influenced by emotions and the rules that guide emotionality. Emotions, in fact, are a key structural element in political journalism (Kotisova, 2019; Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2021). Recognizing this allows for a richer understanding of journalist-politician relationships. So far, this burgeoning line of research has explored increasingly varied facets of the role emotions play, but little theoretical work has been interested in describing the dynamics they affect.

Therefore, this paper introduces the concept of emotional communities (Rosenwein, 2006) into the journalistic-political field, which allows us to emphasize the importance of emotion in structuring it. In this perspective, emotions are a complex phenomenon that influences both personal experiences and social dynamics. Through the lens of emotional communities, journalists and politicians are not viewed as distinct groups, but rather as deeply interrelated and dynamic figurations, which form and are formed by emotional interaction.

We approach the concept through a series of steps: We first explore the existing knowledge on how emotion has been introduced into the study of the professional practices of journalists and politicians. Second, we introduce emotional communities within these professional relationships and explore them in terms of how they are formed and maintained, how they overlap or come into conflict, as well as how they affect interpersonal dynamics and social order. Lastly, we offer insights into how our conceptual thoughts can enrich empirical research in journalism studies.

Emotions in journalism and politics

Emotional communities rely on the assumption that the individual and shared behaviour of journalists and politicians is influenced by, guided by, and results in emotion (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). Therefore, we initially consider how emotion has been studied in journalism and politics. In doing so, we explore how emotion has been conceptualized so far and map a path toward merging emotion into a concept of relationship and field dynamics.

Emotions among journalists

“Journalism has always been emotional”, as Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti (2021: 1149) put it. The perceived dichotomy between detachment and emotionality has been discursively constructed over time. That journalists are supposed to act as detached, rational, and neutral observers is part of the emotional requirements of the historically evolved objectivity norm in journalism (Schmidt, 2021; Schudson and Anderson, 2009). The recent ‘emotional turn’ has shifted attention to the emotionality of both journalism and journalists, encompassing studies of journalistic production, content, and news use as well as individual journalists’ emotional experiences such as anger, cynicism, passion, and fear (Kotisova, 2019; Lukan and Čehovin Zajc, 2024). Thus, emotionality is not confined to journalistic products; it also shapes the practices, experiences, and self-understandings of those who produce it.

When considering the role of emotion for individual journalists, the focus of research has been on the subjective experiences of journalists and their handling of feeling rules (Waschková Císařová, 2021). A substantial body of work utilizes Hochschild’s (1979) concept of emotional management, which refers to how individuals personally adapt to feeling rules through the regulation or suppression of individual emotions. It is frequently applied to describe how journalists cope with the emotional requirements (Glück, 2016); emotional challenges (Šimunjak and Menke, 2023); and stress (Urbániková and Haniková, 2022) of their profession. A significant trend in the field is the conceptual shift seeing emotion as a relational, constructed phenomenon (Kotisova, 2019; Lünenborg and Medeiros, 2021; Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2021).

This shift highlights the performative aspects and social functions of emotion, framing it as a social practice (Scheer, 2012). Following Scheer, it is not about what emotions are, but rather what they do, i.e., how they affect interpersonal dynamics and social order. For instance, Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti view anger and fear as a mobilizing power that “create[s] hostility and divisions among groups” (Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2021: 1153), while Medeiros and Makhashvili (2022), for example, see grief as a unifying and solidarizing force.

Emotions among politicians

Politics and politicians have also always been emotional (Marcus, 2000). However, research on politicians’ emotions has primarily focused on their communicated emotionality and its impact on electoral success. The use of emotional language is considered crucial for mobilising and appealing to voters (Osnabrügge et al., 2021) – it plays both into offline and online dynamics, as emotional language ties into platform logics (De León and Trilling, 2021).

‘Being emotional’ as a politician, thus, is perceived to be linked to political success, which can be fine-tuned along specific emotions. Angry politicians seem to be able to mobilise political action from their supporters (Stapleton and Dawkins, 2022), which is particularly prevalent for more radical parties or politicians (Jacobs et al., 2024). Actors at the fringes of the political spectrum engage in more negative messaging, including appeals to anger, fear, disgust, or sadness (Widmann, 2021). However, politicians also rely on positive emotions, such as pride or hope, which have proven successful in election campaigns (Gerbaudo et al., 2019), even if this stream of research focuses only on publicly and strategically performed emotions. Previous studies have primarily focused on the emotions politicians express when they anticipate a strategic advantage, such as in election campaigns. However, the way their individual emotions shape interactions with others, especially journalists, has rarely been explored.

Relationships between journalists and politicians

Existing literature on the relationship between journalists and politicians usually delves into four main dimensions that describe the relationship between journalists and politicians: power dynamics, harmony and conflict, proximity and formality, and visibility.

First, much of the literature deals with power dynamics, focusing on who holds the upper hand in the relationship. While some studies suggest that journalists and politicians are relatively on par (Örebro, 2002), others attribute more power to either journalists (Strömbäck and Nord, 2006) or politicians (Gans, 1979). Recent shifts in political communication have, however, changed the preconditions as now politicians oftentimes attempt to circumvent traditional media altogether, thus rendering (some) journalists powerless.

In addition to questions of power, the literature also focuses on contradictory interests, with the relationship ranging from harmony to conflict. Studies suggest there has been a turn from a formerly symbiotic cooperation to one increasingly marked by mistrust, hostility, cynicism, and frustration (Brants et al., 2010), increasingly intensified in digitally mediated contexts through populist attacks on journalism and hostile media perceptions (Matthes et al., 2019; Panievsky, 2022; Van Dalen, 2021). Thus, the everyday collaboration between journalists and politicians oscillates between modes of harmonic routine and mutual conflict.

Another strand of research investigates the degree of proximity and formality, ranging from very close and informal relationships and interactions to distant and strictly formal ones (Casero-Ripollés and López-Rabadán, 2019; Malling, 2023; Van Dalen, 2021). While close and informal relationships might seem inappropriate and at odds with journalism’s traditional adversarial and watchdog role, they are crucial for journalists to stay informed, especially in local contexts (Waschková Císařová, 2021; Örebro, 2002). Regular personal interactions between journalists and politicians also positively influence how political actors are portrayed in the media (Van der Goot et al., 2021).

The fourth dimension revolves around the level of visibility and refers to the extent to which interactions between journalists and politicians are exposed to the public (Malling, 2023). Prior research indicates that while the professionalization of political communication has formalized these relationships, it has not eliminated informal exchanges but rather shifted them to a more discreet and less visible mode (Casero-Ripollés and López-Rabadán, 2019).

While the literature on the relationship between journalists and politicians is strong, scholars have only sporadically and anecdotally examined the role that emotions may play in it. Studies have noted positive aspects such as friendliness and cordiality (Ross, 2010), mutual acknowledgement, affection, and humour (Vobič et al., 2017). However, they more often focus on inherent contradictions, such as love and hate (Lukan and Čehovin Zajc, 2024), and negative aspects like occasional irritations (Örebro, 2002), hostility, or mutual suspicion (Van Aelst and Aalberg, 2011). In relation to politicians, research notes their cynicism, discomfort, and negative and hostile attitudes towards journalists, driven by their dissatisfaction with news coverage, fears of political motivation, concerns about media power, and anxieties over journalists misusing information to support opposing sides (Matthes et al., 2019; Van Aelst and Aalberg, 2011). Similarly, in relation to journalists, studies reveal their cynicism, caution, and mistrust towards politicians, as well as feelings of tension, frustration, anger, hatred, humiliation, and fear, which stem from political pressure (Brants et al., 2010).

However, there is still a lack of in-depth theoretical analysis to systematically organize the emotional logics, dynamics, and dimensions. We aim to add to this literature on the journalist-politician relationship through a lens that focuses on emotion as practice rather than individual experience. In this paper, we suggest that empirical and theoretical research must consider not only individual emotional states and traits but also integrate emotion within our understanding of shared professional norms and practices. In short, emotionality and relational dynamics are mutually constitutive: emotions shape, and are shaped by, the professional boundaries between journalists and politicians. This lens requires a shift from focusing on interpersonal interactions between politicians and journalists to examining the collective dynamics that structure and organize this professional field overlap – something we can call emotional communities.

Conceptualising emotional communities in political journalism

The idea of emotional communities was originally introduced by the historian Barbara Rosenwein (2006) in her studies on emotions during the early Middle Ages to show how historical actors place themselves in one community through the “expression of a particular set of collectively shared emotions” (Koschut, 2014: 536). Through this lens, every emotional community is rooted in emotional practices – the ways an actor articulates and communicates emotions to the outside world. How someone labels their emotional state is inherently part of experiencing and sense-making of it (Scheer, 2012), echoing Reddy’s (2001) notion of emotives, i.e., speech acts that not only describe but also actively shape emotional experience.

Rosenwein argues that every emotional expression by an actor is guided by a shared vocabulary – a so-called emotional repertoire that guides individuals’ emotional expression and experience (Scheer, 2012). In this sense, the individual emotion is subsumed to a larger collective emotion that is “performative, discursively constructed […] and usually collective and political” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2018: 2074). While emotional repertoires provide the linguistic and symbolic means for naming and expressing emotions, feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979) define their social appropriateness. Within each emotional community, these rules delineate which emotions can be legitimately expressed, and how, in specific situations. For example, in moments of natural disasters, politicians need to display sincerity or sorrow, while journalists must be empathetic towards the affected but convey their anger towards those in power.

Subsequently, the individual actor and the collective of the emotional community are in a constant state of tension – how a journalist or a politician articulates their feelings is shaped by the emotional communities they belong to. At the same time, every (public) expression also affects and shifts the feeling rules for other members. Emotional practices can be appropriate and successful, or they may fail and be subject to in-group criticism or even rupture the community itself. Therefore, feeling rules indicate affiliations and distinctions: “Feeling rules reflect patterns of social membership. Some rules may be nearly universal […] other rules are unique to particular social groups” (Hochschild, 1979: 566). This perspective highlights the situational and context-sensitive nature of emotions – emotions are not static but are dynamically shaped by temporal, spatial, cultural, social, and individual factors (Rodríguez, 2021: 11). They are continuously negotiated among actors and embedded within political systems and power relations. Rather than being tied to institutional boundaries, Rosenwein visualizes her concept of emotional communities as concentric circles – larger and smaller ones, sometimes overlapping, sometimes isolated (Rosenwein, 2006: 44). Thus, every individual is usually part of multiple emotional communities, “that are united by different, sometimes diametrically opposed emotion norms” (Plamper, 2010: 254). Subsequently, perceived feelings of tension or contradiction are part of the daily emotion work each individual has to put up with to deal with situations that force them to adhere to one or another community (Hochschild, 1979).

Seeing journalists and politicians as parts of an emotional community does not imply that they form a unified or even harmonious group. Rather, it foregrounds the shared norms and practices that emerge at the intersection of politics and journalism – an intersection marked as much by tension as by collaboration. But importantly, these frictions are also emotionally practiced and negotiated, highlighting two distinct normative mandates: accountability for journalists, representation for politicians.

The dance metaphor in the literature captures this ambivalence well: Both groups share the same dance floor and often move to the same rhythm, yet their steps follow different repertoires, institutional logics, and evaluative criteria (Carlson and Lewis, 2019). Following Bourdieu’s (2009) field theory, journalists and politicians operate within overlapping but distinct fields, each with its own temporalities and power cycles. Within this larger constellation, multiple emotional communities emerge that encompass both actor groups. Some of these communities are transient, others more stable, and they are constantly reshaped as norms and expectations about appropriate emotions are negotiated and enacted (Rosenwein, 2006; Scheer, 2012).

This perspective allows us to theorize not only complicity and closeness but also rupture, contestation, and accountability. Importantly, external pressures such as populist critiques and attacks on media legitimacy may temporarily foster a sense of solidarity across professional boundaries, forming an emotional community under threat. At the same time, such dynamics illuminate how accountability and democratic distinction are themselves emotionally enacted: through indignation, distrust, or strategic displays of distance (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019).

Building on this, emotionality in journalist-politician relationships can be understood as strategic, epistemic, and performative. ¹ It is strategic when emotions are mobilized to establish credibility or to control interactional dynamics (e.g., a politician’s indignation in a press conference, or a journalist’s sceptical tone to signal watchdog authority). It is epistemic when emotional styles underpin knowledge practices, such as how detachment or indignation become recognizable cues of legitimate judgment (Kotišová and Van Der Velden, 2025). And it is performative in the sense that emotions are not simply expressed but constitute professionalism itself, enacted through situated practices and institutionalized feeling rules (Wahl-Jorgensen and Pantti, 2021).

The conceptual notion of community is not new to journalism studies, of course, given its long history of exploring journalists as members of interpretive communities built on shared norms and discourses (Zelizer, 1993), communities of practice, centred on shared actions (García-Avilés, 2014), as well as imagined communities (Litt, 2012) in relation to audience perceptions. These frameworks explain how journalists create group identities and professional boundaries through discourse and practice (Carlson and Lewis, 2019).

However, the concept of emotional communities highlights relational dynamics of community formation: By emphasizing emotion norms and practices, this approach brings interpersonal interactions as well as broader social negotiation processes into view. Emotions and interactions are mutually shaping processes: they co-evolve in practice, as feelings both arise from and orient professional encounters, influencing how proximity, distance, trust, or conflict take form. Emotional communities capture how journalists and politicians continuously negotiate feelings, such as anger, empathy, coolness, or cynicism, through their everyday work. In contrast to affective communities, which often arise in moments of rupture or crisis but remain short-lived and situational (Zink, 2019), emotional communities are shaped through sustained practices that reproduce shared norms and a sense of normality over time.

This focus on the entanglement of emotion norms and practices distinguishes this concept from other community concepts. Whereas interpretive communities privilege discourses, communities of practice emphasize routines, and imagined communities highlight symbolic affiliations, emotional communities show how these dimensions intersect and become stabilized or contested through shared emotional repertoires and feeling rules. They render the structuring power of emotions in professional fields visible and provide journalism studies with a framework to analyse how emotion norms both enable cooperation and reproduce conflict across institutional and professional boundaries.

Dimensions of emotional communities

Although emotions in the relationship between journalists and politicians have seldom been explicitly addressed, they have always been metaphorically present – as love, as a tug-of-war, as a dance. They shine through in the four axes of research on the relationship we have outlined before, but the concept of emotional communities helps us rethink these traditional originating points of analysis and identify some ideas for future research to operationalize the emotional dimensions in the journalism-politics field.

Power dynamics

While previous studies have focused on who holds the upper hand in the relationship between journalists and politicians (Strömbäck and Nord, 2006), Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities adds a different dimension to this discussion. It draws attention to the affective foundations of power — specifically, to the ability of certain collectives to establish, maintain, or challenge dominant feeling rules within a shared emotional order. Rather than asking which group – journalists or politicians – holds more power, it is thus more productive to view them as part of a shared field in which power is exercised through adherence to, or subversion of, these emotion norms.

One illustrative example of this approach might be the ideal of detachment in journalism. Within emotional communities, detachment can be understood as a feeling rule, demanding regulation and suppression of emotional expressions, such as empathy, indignation, or enthusiasm to maintain credibility (Kotišová and Van Der Velden, 2025; Schmidt, 2021). This rule emerged in the late 19th century and has shaped a dominant emotional community within journalism, valorising emotional neutrality as a professional ideal (Schudson and Anderson, 2009). It is not merely static but actively renegotiated through narrations and interactions. For instance, journalists who strictly adhere to detachment may hold significant influence over newcomers, creating a powerful clique that maintains these norms.

On the political side, a complementary set of feeling rules prevails: politicians are expected to display enthusiasm, empathy, and authenticity (Luebke, 2021). Their professionalism does not rest on emotional withdrawal but on emotional presence: Affective displays, such as showing passion, responding to public sentiment, and performing accessibility, are essential strategies of legitimation and mobilization (Frevert et al., 2022).

In this sense, journalism and politics cultivate contrasting yet interdependent emotion norms and repertoires. Detachment reinforces the image of journalists as impartial observers, while the politicians’ emotionality highlights their role as responsive representatives. At the same time, these repertoires may irritate each other when expectations are breached – the “overly emotional” journalist risks accusations of partisanship, while the “overly detached” politician may be perceived as cold or technocratic.

The consequences of these dynamics are twofold: On the one hand, adherence to feeling rules shapes the professional identities and emotional practices of individual journalists and politicians. On the other hand, it reinforces the cohesion and power positions of the emotional community itself. At the same time, power dynamics can shift when actors challenge or deviate from feeling rules. The emergence of emotional journalistic practices, such as immersive journalism or constructive journalism, exemplifies these struggles, highlighting the (in)stability and contingency of emotion norms (Greber et al., 2023). This dual efficacy of emotional communities – influencing both individuals and the collective – reveals how power operates on multiple levels and does not emerge from fixed hierarchies or dichotomies such as “the journalists” versus “the politicians”.

In sum, Rosenwein’s concept allows us to better analyse the dynamic power interplay between journalists and politicians, which is inherently shaped by their affiliation to certain emotional communities. For example, journalists who adhere to the feeling rules of emotional detachment do struggle to properly deal with members of populist parties who constantly subvert and undermine these rules (Leser and Spissinger, 2023). Thus, investigating in which emotional communities certain actors place themselves and others, and what emotion norms they adhere to, uncovers the affective foundations of their power relations.

Harmony and conflict

The everyday interactions of journalists and politicians sway from a harmonic routine to moments of disruption, even though the latter do not necessarily impact their relationship in the long term (Örebro, 2002). Still, research in recent years has observed a trend towards strained and more problematic relationships – several scholars link it to the rise of populist actors and their deliberate attacks on journalists (Matthes et al., 2019; Van Dalen, 2021).

Emotional communities follow a similar rhythm – they are shaped by the constant interplay of harmony and conflict, by routines and disruptions. Within journalism and politics, harmony emerges when shared feeling rules align with the expectations and practices of a group, fostering a sense of cohesion and mutual understanding. Routines, such as press conferences, daily newsroom interactions, or sessions of the parliamentary club, reinforce established feeling norms and create a stable setting that supports solidarity and collective functioning. Several scholars hint at some sort of affinity or like-mindedness that journalists and politicians have to share to strengthen their collaboration (Davis, 2009). This is, however, not just limited to political affiliation or professional norms, but more broadly to a similar configuration of shared feelings. In this sense, a harmonic, routinized relationship between journalists and politicians is based on a mutual agreement on certain feeling rules. They can rally around political sentiments, such as the importance of public media broadcasting, or non-political affinities, resulting, for example, in regular cricket or football matches between parliamentarians and political reporters (Davis, 2009). Through practices of routinisation and professionalisation, the importance of personal affinity sometimes becomes obscured, but it fundamentally structures their everyday working mode (Casero-Ripollés and López-Rabadán, 2019).

In times of harmony, emotional communities are sometimes hard to identify. In times of conflict, their outlines become suddenly much more pronounced. Research from political communication has shown how party members rally around their organisation during election campaigns (Öhberg and Cassel, 2023). A similar effect was observable in journalism when Donald Trump started attacking prominent media figures, and they started solidarizing with each other in resistance (Koliska et al., 2020). These dynamics of harmony and conflict are not only observable at the collective level but also experienced profoundly by individuals. Journalists and politicians must often adapt their emotions to meet the shared feeling rules of their professional environments. Thus, while existing studies on emotional management and coping mechanisms often focus on the individual, the concept of emotional communities allows these personal experiences to be situated within a larger context in the journalistic-political field.

Proximity and formality

Existing research (Van Dalen, 2021; Waschková Císařová, 2021) investigates the proximity and the different levels of formality of everyday relationships between journalists and politicians. Through the lens of emotional communities, shared feeling rules, and emotional expectations shape the spectrum between informal camaraderie and professional detachment. By identifying similar emotion norms and emotion practices, we can assess how political and journalistic actors place themselves in their respective emotional communities. Given that emotional communities are unlimited in their number of potential members, their inner cohesion is highly relevant for research. They can be as tight-knit as a core family – especially in local contexts – or “as amorphous as an elite in which many members do not know one another personally yet share certain assumptions, goals, and values that have – perforce – emotional components” (Rosenwein, 2003: 2). Thus, emotional communities evolve around various layers of proximity and formality. This means that both the limited number of local journalists working in one small town and the hundreds of national parliamentarians might form an emotional community with “numerous unwritten hierarchical rules and procedures” (Mannevuo, 2020: 419), even though their levels of proximity are very different.

One illustration of this is Lünenborg and Medeiros’ (2021) description of the editorial office at the magazine Der Spiegel as an affective community (Zink, 2019) in the wake of the revelations that in-house journalist Claas Relotius had forged parts of his investigative stories. In particular, they highlight the emotional bonding between team members and “the power of feeling rules to define and justify social status” in this context (Lünenborg and Medeiros, 2021: p. 1731). Such affective communities emerge regularly in times of “experiential proximity” (Zink, 2019: 294), but they can also transform into more long-lived, stable emotional configurations in newsrooms, allowing them to be labelled emotional communities. We argue that every newsroom or party itself is an emotional community with a specific hierarchy and emotional style, physical and topical closeness, a shared self-understanding, a collective repertoire of emotional language, and associated feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979). This is accentuated by the proximity of Der Spiegel journalists who share offices, buildings, or communication channels, even though being physically close is not a precondition for feeling close, given the importance of virtual proximity in a digital age. However, physical closeness does increase the likelihood of switching from purely formal and professional modes of interaction to informal settings (Davis, 2009). To find the emotional communities between journalists and politicians, spaces of high proximity, e.g., the parliament or informal after-work events, offer initial starting points for research.

Visibility

Disentangling formality and visibility of interactions between journalists and politicians proves to be conceptually difficult (Malling, 2023), yet remains crucial for understanding how emotion norms operate across different interactional arenas. The professionalisation of political communication has produced highly choreographed public formats – press conferences, social media interactions, or live-streamed interviews – where emotional expressions are tightly regulated. At the same time, core aspects of the working relationship between journalists and politicians unfold in less visible spaces: phone calls, text messages, informal meetings, or conversations in the hallway. The lens of emotional communities helps explain why this distribution of visibility matters.

Emotional breaches in such contexts are therefore particularly telling – for example, when German politician Armin Laschet laughed during a visit to a flood-stricken area in 2021, the public backlash underscored not just his deviation from political feeling rules but also clashed with the public’s broader expectations of solemnity and empathy in a moment of national tragedy (Olesen, 2024). In such public settings, politicians and journalists must navigate not only the internal feeling rules of their own emotional communities but also the societal norms that define what is considered emotionally appropriate in each context. Situations of visible disruption, like Laschet’s laughter, highlight the dual accountability of public figures to both their professional emotional communities and the collective emotion norms of the society they address.

This is equally true for journalists. In public environments, journalists must also consider the emotional expectations of their audiences. In more informal, background contexts, they often draw on strategies like cynicism to navigate their emotional communities (Brants et al., 2010). These practices, while fostering individual coping mechanisms, can also lead to collective dynamics, such as the “spiral of cynicism” described by Brants et al. (2010). Conceptualizing journalists as an emotional community of cynics reframes cynicism not merely as a response to precarious working conditions (Kotisova, 2019) or self-censorship (Lukan and Čehovin Zajc, 2024), but rather as a productive force that affects the stability and cohesion of emotional communities, especially in background settings.

Thus, emotional communities help to explain why certain emotional practices, like professional detachment, are visible in public contexts (e.g., press conferences or television interviews), while others, like emotional venting, are relegated to backstage or private interactions. Press conferences, for instance, are shaped by norms of professionalism, making them public-facing events where emotional neutrality is expected and reinforced. In contrast, background conversations remain hidden because they often involve deviations from these norms, which might include expressions of frustration, humour, or informal bonding. The visibility of emotional practices and feeling rules, then, is not just a descriptive observation but an analytical moment for understanding how emotional communities operate, where their internal hierarchies and boundaries lie, and where potential fractures or tension points occur.

Emotional communities: A research agenda for Journalism Studies

The concept of emotional communities provides an analytical entry point into the daily interactions between journalists and politicians, as outlined in the four dimensions of power dynamics, harmony and conflict, proximity and formality, and visibility. While the recognition that emotions matter in these relationships is not new, the concept advances the field by clarifying how emotion norms and practices can be systematically examined. We see at least three promising avenues for further research.

Linking individual and collective emotions

As outlined, research on the emotions of journalists and politicians has so far focused primarily on individual experiences, while the collective dynamics of emotions remain less explored. Yet emotions such as trust, cynicism, hostility, or humour are not merely private sentiments but socially regulated norms and practices shaping professional relationships.

A focus on emotional communities offers a lens that operates precisely at the intersection of individual accounts and collective dynamics. It allows scholars to understand the interplay between the subjective experience of emotions such as cynicism (Brants et al., 2010), frustration (Urbániková and Haniková, 2022), or detachment (Stupart, 2021), and how these experiences translate into communal practices. Also, it enables us to model whether these practices are stable or dynamic across professional identities, field boundaries, and power relations. Empirically, the approach of emotional communities requires a multi-scalar design that traces how emotions are felt, performed, and negotiated across different levels of social interaction.

Individual accounts remain an important starting point – in interviews, observations, or surveys, how actors narrate, perform, evaluate emotions, reveal feeling rules and interaction rituals through which emotional communities can be identified. The distinctiveness of this approach does not lie in a simple preference for qualitative or inductive methods, but in a shift in both the type and content of questions asked. Rather than focusing solely on how individual journalists or politicians describe their own feelings, a multi-scalar perspective directs attention to the relational dynamics of emotion – how emotional orientations circulate between actors and shape their professional relationships. This means exploring how emotions become visible in interactions: which feelings guide exchanges between journalists and politicians, and which emotional expressions are considered appropriate or out of place in specific contexts. Such an approach moves beyond the individual level to capture the shared norms and affective expectations that structure emotional life across fields. Methodologically, this requires a flexible design that moves between inductive and deductive reasoning – beginning with an open, explorative stance that allows for situational and unexpected emotions, while also enabling more structured, comparative analyses as patterns of emotional communities emerge.

The analytical task is thus not to classify emotions as “positive” or “negative”, but to examine how they are legitimized, sanctioned, or silenced within specific professional settings. Existing studies have demonstrated, for instance, how emotions such as anger, compassion, or cynicism become professionalized differently across journalistic cultures, and how emotional suppression can become a collective norm within political or crisis reporting (Kotisova, 2019). What emerges is a perspective on emotion as a relational practice: Situated between individuals and collectives, and constitutive of the social texture of journalism and politics alike.

Following data collection, insights from interviews, observations, and surveys – but also from media content analysis – can then be clustered into the shared practices we describe above and interpreted as emotional communities. As argued, there may be one, several, or many emotional communities in each context. These emotional communities may be relatively stable or transient in over-time observations, as we describe in the following section.

Capturing spatio-temporal dynamics

Research on the relationship between journalists and politicians needs to cultivate a historical awareness of how emotions are shaped over time, that is, how feeling rules crystallize, stabilize, and shift across election cycles, routines, and disruptions, or broader cultural transformations. Journalism’s emotional repertoire, for instance, has ranged from the sensationalism of early tabloids (Örnebring and Jönsson, 2004) to the credibility performances of broadcast anchors, and today to “affective news streams” (Papacharissi, 2015: 34). Similarly, politicians’ repertoires have moved from institutionalized charisma (Bourdieu, 1987) to digital performances of likability and authenticity (Luebke, 2021).

To grasp these dynamics, future research needs longitudinal designs that move beyond isolated snapshots in time. Historical text analyses, archival research, and long-term content analyses can trace how emotional repertoires consolidate or erode across decades – for example, how the norm of detachment co-evolved with ideals of journalistic objectivity, or how recent forms of affective expression reconfigure legitimacy in journalism and politics. A historical orientation also enables a revisiting of classical debates on rationality and emotionality, showing how these categories have been continuously redefined across different periods.

In addition, longitudinal diary or observational studies could capture the temporal evolution of emotions in journalists’ and politicians’ everyday interactions, documenting how moments of trust, frustration, or solidarity unfold over time. Moreover, methods that traditionally provide only brief snapshots, such as experiments or short-term field studies, could be extended into longitudinal or iterative designs. For instance, living labs or field experiments repeated across election cycles could reveal how emotional dynamics stabilize, shift, or dissolve under changing political and media conditions. Finally, spatio-temporal sensitivity requires attention to multi-level empirical approaches. Emotional communities may emerge differently at national, regional, and local levels, where distinct political and journalistic traditions shape how affective repertoires develop, circulate, and sediment over time. For instance, future studies could examine how emotional styles of reporting and communication differ between EU correspondents working in Brussels and local journalists embedded in municipal politics, or how emotional expectations shift between metropolitan and rural newsroom cultures. Comparative and longitudinal research across these levels could reveal how emotion norms and practices diverge, adapt, or reinforce one another across election cycles, crises, or institutional changes.

Such designs may also explore how moments of political turbulence, such as coalition breakdowns or campaign scandals, reshape the emotional boundaries between journalists and politicians, or how recurring events like press conferences and election nights stabilize shared affective repertoires. In this way, multi-dimensional and sensitive approaches allow us to trace emotional dynamics across spaces and times.

Addressing visibility and digital mediation

Much of the emotional interaction between journalists and politicians unfolds in informal or private contexts: backstage moments, “off the record” exchanges, or encrypted messaging channels (Malling, 2023). At the same time, social media and digital platforms blur the boundaries between public and private, formal and informal (Ekman and Widholm, 2015). What was once ephemeral may today become visible through leaks, screenshots, or algorithmic amplification, while what appears accessible at one moment may quickly be deleted, edited, or rendered invisible.

Analytical attention should therefore place architectures of visibility at the centre, examining how they are managed across hybrid constellations of online and offline interaction. Informal encounters will often remain obscured even for ethnographic research, yet digital traces on social media provide new empirical pathways. The task for researchers is to assemble and contextualize these affective fragments (e.g. tweets, posts, emojis, or live streams) as traces of emotional communities.

Different studies already illustrate how such traces can be approached: Vobič et al. (2017) show how combining Twitter exchanges with interview data reveals how subjective and personal factors shape relationships between journalists and politicians, while Medeiros and Makhashvili’s (2022) research on digital grief communities illustrates how shared emotions can become constitutive of social groups online. Despite their acknowledged importance, digital and social media have so far been studied mainly in terms of visibility and strategy, rather than emotional norms and relational dynamics. Therefore, future studies of journalism and politics should trace how hybrid infrastructures of analogue spaces and digital platforms configure the boundaries of emotional communities. Accordingly, future research might ask: Which emotions come to mobilize and organize emotional communities across online and offline settings? How do hybrid architectures of visibility shape the ways emotions are expressed, shared, or silenced? And in what ways do digital traces of emotional expression allow us to identify, compare, or historicize the emotional communities of journalists and politicians?

Conclusion

This paper has proposed emotional communities as a conceptual lens to analyse the relationship between journalists and politicians. The concept bridges the individual and the collective, linking personal experiences to shared emotion norms and practices. It extends existing community frameworks in journalism studies by highlighting the emotional dimension of professional life: whereas interpretive communities focus on shared discourses, communities of practice on routines, and imagined communities on symbolic belonging, emotional communities capture how these dimensions intersect through collective emotional repertoires and feeling rules.

Understanding emotions as social practices allows us to see how journalists and politicians jointly produce and maintain their professional worlds. Emotional communities provide the affective infrastructure through which trust, distance, or cynicism are enacted and stabilized across institutional boundaries. In this sense, emotions constitute social reality by shaping the very conditions under which professional interaction becomes possible.

Future research could advance this approach along three lines. First, temporally, by tracing how emotional dynamics evolve across events or political cycles. Second, spatially, by comparing how emotional communities differ at national, regional, and local levels. And third, methodologically, by integrating multi-scalar and longitudinal designs that connect everyday interactions with broader field structures.

Although grounded within journalism studies, the concept of emotional communities is equally applicable to political communication research and to analyses centred more strongly on political actors. By foregrounding the emotional underpinnings of professional relations, this perspective moves beyond binary notions of closeness and distance. It shifts the analytical focus from journalists and politicians as separate groups to the shared affective field that binds – and at times divides – them. In doing so, the concept of emotional communities opens new pathways for studying emotion as a constitutive force of journalistic and political life.