The Political is Personal: The Costs of Daily Politics

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics. We used longitudinal, daily-diary methods to track two samples of U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across two weeks (Study 1: N=198, observations=2,167) and three weeks (Study 2: N=811, observations=12,790) to explore how these events permeated people’s lives and how people coped with that influence. In both studies, daily political events consistently evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also increased motivation to t¬ake political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political system that evoked these emotions in the first place. Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions; and regulating these emotions using effective cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action. Although people can protect themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently-used regulation strategies appear to come with a trade-off between well-being and action. To examine whether an alternative approach to one’s emotions could avoid this trade-off, we measured emotional acceptance in Study 2 (i.e., accepting one’s emotions without trying to change them), which predicted greater daily well-being but no impairment to political action. Overall, this research highlights how politics can be a chronic stressor in people’s daily lives, underscoring the far-reaching influence politicians have beyond the formal powers endowed unto them