Series as a populism laboratory - MORES project researches moral feelings in politics

Mr Scherer, for your article you looked at three series, "Servant of the People", "The Campaigners" and "The Amazing Mrs Pritchard", in which a supermarket manager, a social worker and a history teacher unexpectedly have master political careers - right up to the presidency. What are your research interests about these series and their characters?
The study is focussed on the relationship between politics and series. We asked ourselves, where are positive solutions imagined in popular series culture? Where is there a hidden utopianism? The selected series react to the crisis of democracy by imagining these unlikely candidates. We do not look at the series characters as if they were real politicians; we are concerned with the politics of audiovisual images. We describe the series as fictional worlds that give us ways of perceiving the world we live in. We have tried to find out what the series can say about our democratic community by imagining such interventions in political orders. It's about whether TV series can be read as laboratories for populisms and how they help in thinking about whether such political currents can strengthen or revitalise democracies by making them accessible to other groups of people.

In all three cases, you describe outbursts of anger as the starting point of political careers. Is anger necessary in politics?
These outbursts of anger are not characteristic of the politicians in the series that determines their political style. Rather, the anger marks the moment when they go from being citizens to politicians. For the rest of their time in office, they are busy containing this rage and awakening other feelings with which they can address the community. This is an interesting difference to populist parties such as the AfD, which rely on permanent anger. In the series, anger is a brief moment of visualisation and transformation for groups that don't normally have a political voice, or at least don't feel that way. That's what I find exciting about these series

Is the anger you observed one of the moral emotions you are exploring in the larger MORES research project?
Yes, it's a fairly prototypical moral emotion. The term moral emotion was coined by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He assumes that some feelings do not primarily affect us as individuals, but as a community. To put it simply, feelings are moral if they have to do with the well-being of a community. It is important to note that moral does not mean that we judge these feelings as good or bad; it can go both ways. Anger, for example, can have pro- or anti-social effects.

You describe a populist approach to the series in your article. How do you understand populism in this case?
We use a purely descriptive term for populism that does not involve judgements. This form of populism sees society as a two-part construct, on the one hand the people as the bearers of sovereignty and on the other the negatively connoted elite, which limits the rule of the people. Populism sees a very strong antagonism there.

But the word populism is often used differently.
Yes, in German discourse "populist" is often a fighting term; it's never you yourself, it's always the others. However, this is very different internationally. For example, there is an interview with Barack Obama in which he insists that he is the populist and not Donald Trump, because he is just a rioter who does not stand up for the interests of the people. One positive aspect of populism would be that it brings marginalised groups and those who have turned their backs on politics back into politics, thereby increasing the legitimacy of democratic governments.

In addition to the main characters from the analysed series, does this also apply to real politicians who were famous for completely different things before they became politicians, such as Donald Trump or Volodymyr Zelensky?
If you look at it positively, you could see whether such personalities are able to appeal to non-voters in a different way and bring them to the ballot box. From a pessimistic point of view, however, you also have to think about the entertainisation of daily politics and the competition for attention. The suspicion can creep up on you that whoever is more entertaining also gets more attention from the media. Incidentally, in the series, politicians are not seen through rose-coloured glasses. After they are swept into office, they realise that they don't really have a three-dimensional political agenda, but rather one or two hobbyhorse issues. Then there is the problem of finding the right supporters.

Can you also apply the findings from your research to the current federal election campaign?
Yes, especially the question of the various populisms. I have just heard a lecture by the journalist Stephan Hebel, who said that we have to save reason from common sense. He was talking about the observation that certain emotions and reflexes, which are very legitimate as private reactions, are transformed into political slogans. One example was the reactions to the murders in Magdeburg and Aschaffenburg. With these series in mind, I have become more sensitive to this: Where exactly are moral reflexes and emotions, which initially correspond to common sense, transferred into systematisation and politics? As I described, the series heroes take a step back from their own anger. I sometimes missed this step in the federal election campaign.

What is the next step in your research on emotions in politics?
The research on the series has been completed; a working paper will be published in a few weeks, in which the condensed results from the blog post will be described in more detail.
The next step in the MORES project will be to look very closely at emotion strategies in news reporting. We will do this by comparing countries and programmes in Germany, France, Poland and Hungary. We are taking random samples of private and public service content from the years 2014, 2019 and 2024 to see: Are there trends towards emotionalisation? Is the news tending to become more emotional? If so, on which topics and with which emotions? We want to answer this question on the one hand by analysing the news programmes and on the other by interviewing journalists who are responsible for which news is broadcast and how.

Frauke Adesiyan