The Role of Political Leaders in Regulating Collective Emotional Resilience: A Study of Leadership Communication Dynamics During a Time of Crisis

We investigate how political leaders regulate collective emotional resilience during periods of crisis. Our objective is to understand the mechanisms through which leaders foster emotional stability within society by analysing their communication strategies. Specifically, we examine the discursive strategies employed by Democratic leaders (President Joe Biden, and Vice President Kamala Harris) and Republican leaders (former President Donald Trump, and Senator JD Vance) in their public statements following the attempted assassination of Trump on July 13, 2024. Using Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), we explore how collective emotional resilience is discursively regulated. In doing so, we make three noteworthy contributions to the extant literature. First, our findings contribute to the study of leadership by testing Goldenberg’s (2024) strategies for regulating collective emotions in a real-life context. Second, we validate both the crisis leadership functions identified by Boin et al. (2016) and the resilience-building practices uncovered by Gigliotti (2024). Third, and most importantly, we extend the theory of collective emotions by introducing the concept of discursive-moral regulation, which explains how leaders shape collective emotional resilience through moral and rhetorical governance.