Emotions and E-participation of Young People: A Preliminary Study

The following paper presents a quantitative content analysis of blog posts of selected discussions on a EU wide e-participation platform with the goal of showing that emotional writing is an indicator for the frequency of participation in online deliberations. The platform analyzed for this research has been designed to bring young people in contact with stakeholders and politicians in order to discuss politically relevant topics for young people in Europe. We argue that political participation is motivated by emotions that should be reflected in the blog posts of users. We theorize that more emotional users will also be more active on the platform. Although there have been significant data limitations, our paper indicates that emotions have a positive effect on political e-participation.