Replication Data for: Do Politicians Appeal to Discrete Emotions? The Effect of Wind Turbine Construction on Elite Discourse

Do political actors appeal to discrete emotions? In this study, I investigate how politicians adapt their emotional rhetoric to increased political conflict over climate change. To do so, I apply transformer-based machine learning classifier to a large dataset of text data coming from German Members of Parliament in order to measure discrete emotional appeals. Relying on staggered difference-in-difference models, I find robust results showing that local construc- tions of wind turbines cause the strongest opponents of climate change mitigation policies (radical-right MPs) to appeal to a specific negative moral emotion. Less robust evidence sug- gests a similar effect for the strongest proponents (Green MPs), however, appealing to a dif- ferent discrete emotion. The effects range between 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points per additional wind turbine. These findings indicate the importance of distinct emotional framing in politi- cal communication with important implications for societal polarization and healthy political discourse.