Pandemic Narratives: emotional attitudes and political choices in Italy during the Covid-19 emergency, 15th International Conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA), Barcelona (Spain), 31th August-2nd September 2021. Co-author: Angela Perulli.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a strong impact on our lives, emotional attitudes and political choices. More than twenty years ago, Marcus (2000) highlighted how political sciences have been largely dominated by cognitive accounts and by a neat division and opposition between emotion and reason. Social and political scientists have recently managed to make up for the missed opportunities, and several scholars have discussed and illustrated, from different perspectives, the key role that emotions play on political attitudes and behaviour. Yet findings connecting the pandemic and people emotional attitudes in light of political choices taken at the Governmental level remain inconsistent and in need of further development (Amat et al., 2020; Bol et al, 2020; Grossman et al., 2020; Harell, 2020; Leininger and Shaub, 2020; Reny and Barreto, 2020). This paper contributes to current debates on these issues by focusing on the complex emotional scenario characterising Italy during the Covid-19 emergency. What kind of emotional attitudes prevail in Italy during the pandemic? How do such emotional attitudes affect and are affected by political choices? Why? What type of broader narratives do they contribute to create and consolidate? What are or may be the potential long-term implications of such narratives? Drawing on a discourse and visual analysis of different types of media and communication channels, this paper aims to address some of these questions. A focus on the Italian case study—whose Government crisis in the middle of the pandemic undoubtedly represents an exception in the international scenario—can add relevant insights in the complex and ambivalent relationships between emotions and politics.