During his stay at Keio University as a Visiting Professor in April and May 2026, Professor Christian von Scheve (Freie Universität Berlin) delivered a guest lecture on the evening of April 21, entitled “Emotions in Politics: Everyday Interactions, Polarized Relations, and the Contestation of Emotions.”
The lecture summarized Professor von Scheve’s recent research and sought to reconceptualize political conflict not merely as a matter of interests, ideologies, or institutional arrangements, but as an interactional process constituted by emotions. In an age of “polycrisis,” in which climate change, pandemics, wars, and the destabilization of the liberal-democratic order overlap, political conflicts that divide society have become increasingly frequent. Although conventional conflict theory, social movement theory, deliberative democratic theory, and polarization research have referred to emotions, they have often treated them as causes, by-products, or noise. In contrast, Professor von Scheve positioned emotions as an “infrastructure” of political life and as a central factor in explaining who speaks, who is listened to, how groups are formed and divided, and under what conditions conflicts escalate.
The analyses presented in the lecture extended across three levels: micro, meso, and macro. First, at the micro level, everyday political conversations are not merely instances of deliberation, but interaction rituals involving co-presence, shared focus, and entrainment. They generate emotional energy such as affirmation, tension, discomfort, recognition, and solidarity. An experience-sampling study conducted around the 2025 German federal election showed that interactions concerning political topics can be classified into three types: “kitchen-table,” “peer,” and “incidental encounter” interactions. The study also showed that emotional outcomes are shaped not only by opinion agreement, but also by intimacy, the emotional expressions of the interaction partner, and status-assertive cues. Second, these everyday interactions create group boundaries through emotional alignment and constitute relations between “us” and “them.” In surveys on climate policy and asylum policy, the polarization between progressives and conservatives appeared not simply as a difference of opinion, but as an asymmetrical distribution of intergroup emotions such as anger, disgust, contempt, and joy.
Third, emotional alignment promotes collective action. Especially among supporters of progressive climate policies, the sense of being emotionally aligned with others strongly predicts visible and interactive forms of protest participation, such as demonstrations and civil disobedience. However, this effect is not uniform; it differs according to the issue, organizational membership, and form of protest. Finally, the lecture emphasized that emotions not only generate conflict, but also become objects of contestation in their own right. Political camps struggle not only over policies and strategies, but also over which emotions are legitimate, whether anger is appropriate, and whether fear or shame is justified. Professor von Scheve therefore concluded that, in order to understand political conflict, emotions must be analyzed not as external factors, but as constitutive forces that run through interaction, group formation, collective action, and public discourse. The lecture was followed by a lively question-and-answer session.
Although the lecture was delivered entirely in English without interpretation, nearly twenty participants attended, including Keio alumni, correspondence-course students, and professors from other universities who joined online. This indicated a strong interest in the topic. The lecture was held as part of the Colloquium in Sociology organized by Professor Takemitsu Morikawa of the Faculty of Letters and the Graduate School of Human Relations. The Colloquium in Sociology regularly organizes lectures by researchers from universities abroad.