Open, Effective, and Emotional

Somewhere in Brussels, an organisation launches a campaign to change how Europe talks about migration: portraits, testimonies, a set of hashtags. It wants Europeans to feel sympathy for immigrants, many of them leaving conflict behind. In an AfD office in Germany, someone edits a TikTok video about a town that has had enough. The party, which has already posted out ‘deportation tickets’ and is gaining support, brings conflict in: it stirs anger towards immigrants that it claims threaten the nation. The two camps loathe each other but share one belief: whip up the right emotional tone and the public will come round.

Both are half right. Emotional narratives do influence public opinion, but not necessarily in the way either side assumes. Years of research have shown that people rarely change their views about migrants themselves, because these beliefs are deeply rooted in values, ideology, and political identity. On its own, though, that is not a practical conclusion. Immigration is a legitimate policy problem in Europe and beyond, but debates are polarised between the far left and far right, which muddles solutions and strains democracy. Overshadowed in between are well-reasoned, but sometimes less catchy, insights that policymaking actually needs.

In June this year, the EU’s Pact on Migration and Asylum began to apply. Its first solidarity pool commits member states to 21,000 asylum-seeker relocations, or a €20,000 contribution for each one they opt not to receive, to relieve pressure on front-line countries such as Cyprus and Spain. Member states will have to make a choice and defend it to voters, while opponents, especially on the far right, attack the policy at large. Explaining that choice is not straightforward. If changing people’s beliefs about migrants seems impossible no matter whether emotional narratives are used, how can democratic actors supporting the policy compete with loud, sensationalist critics on TikTok?

Our research shows where they have room: judgements about the policy itself can move regardless of those deeply rooted beliefs, but how the story is pitched decides which way. We tested this through an experimental survey with over 4,000 respondents in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. Each participant read one version of the same story about Elias, an asylum seeker arriving in Europe. The facts were identical, but the emotional framing varied. Some versions emphasised either hope or empathy; others focused on fear or anger; a control group received an emotionally neutral account. We then measured responses at three levels: support for specific asylum instruments such as Dublin and Eurodac, general preferences regarding migration policy, and broader attitudes towards migrants.

MORES Pulse, our free AI tool, can detect the emotional framing of any communication.

For those backing the policy, that room opens only on the broad direction of migration policy. Here, the emotional narratives anchored in hope and empathy increased support for a more open stance. Fear and anger produced no comparable effect. The impacts were modest, but this is evidence from a single treatment: reading one brief, positive human story was enough, even if it didn’t change readers’ views about migrants.

Anger- and fear-driven communication shifted participants against specific, named policy instruments such as Dublin, Eurodac, and burden-sharing more than the procedural account did. That was expected. The surprise is that empathy, the emotion that opened people up on the broad direction, closed them down on the named instruments along with the two negative emotions. This finding deserves investigation, but it does not eclipse the overall conclusion: this effect applies when referring to specific policies.

For those, factual and emotionless narratives appear safer as these policies seem to be judged primarily through perceptions of competence, fairness, and institutional performance. The main lesson, then, is not simply to use emotions in general, but to use the right kind of emotional communication for the right policy task—which MORES Pulse, our free, private AI tool that detects the emotional framing of any text, can help with.

Elias’s story was the same in every version; what readers made of it was not. Our evidence, under peer review for publication in a scientific journal, defies the usual assumption that a given emotion—positive or negative—will always produce an expected effect in political messaging. Emotional discourse is neither inherently manipulative nor always beneficial. Crafted responsibly, it can sustain support for government action while still making liberal democracy feel both open and effective. On a politically contested issue such as migration, that feeling matters just as much.

Meet the Authors

Vinicius Gorczeski holds a Master of Public Administration from Central European University, Vienna. He is Research Impact & Communications Officer at ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, and MORES’s Communications Manager.

Zsolt Boda, Research Professor at Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, is MORES's Principal Investigator. He holds an MA in Economics and PhD in Political Science. Boda has extensive participation in research projects, funded by the EU and the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund. Learn more on MORES’s Database of Experts.

Research Information

Jonathan Camillo Kamkhaji, Zsolt Boda, Claudio Maria Radaelli, and Attila Bartha. Emotional Narratives, Immigration Attitudes, and Affective Persuasion (forthcoming: under review with scientific journal).

Follow the debate

Get evidence-based insights from MORES experts and event invitations—including MORES’s joint closing conference with PROTEMO and PLEDGE, taking place in Brussels in December 2026. Sign up to our newsletter today.

Write to us

Get in touch with the MORES team: [email protected].