The Emotional Foundations of Authoritarian Discourse: A Mixed-Method Study of Anger, Disgust and Fear in Online Discussions on News Issues

Manuscript in review.

This paper contributes a mixed-methods research design for analysing the emotional foundations of authoritarian discourse in online publics. By combining in-depth discourse analysis with longitudinal computational analysis of news-linked forum discussions from 2010–2024, it connects the contextual articulation of anger, disgust, and fear to broader patterns of topic association and temporal intensification. The paper demonstrates how qualitative and large-scale text-analytic approaches can be integrated to study authoritarian discourse as both situated practice and evolving communicative structure.