Emotion as power: capital and strategy in the field of politics

Recent work across the social sciences have converged on the issue of emotion. In the vanguard of these advances has been the sociology of emotions, broadly defined, which, in various guises - structural, cultural, critical, social psychological, positivist and so on - has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the emotional dimensions of social life, and its centrality to the explanation and understanding of social action. In this paper, and building on previous work, I wish to make a contribution to an increasingly important interdisciplinary sub-field - the political sociology of emotion - and to reconsider and explain the increasingly important role of emotional practice, understood as the strategic deployment of emotional capital, in contemporary party politics.