How Emotional Dynamics Maintain and Destroy White Supremacist Groups

In this article, we explore emotions as a relational mechanism that affects the stability of political movement groups by activating or weakening identities, social ties, and movement boundaries. Our goal is to specify the dynamics by which personal emotional experiences are linked to wider group processes. In this way, emotion serves as an analytic bridge, connecting the micro levels to larger social structures. We draw on data from former violent white supremacists to understand the personal/interpersonal (micro) and group (meso) level emotional dynamics in this extremist movement, especially how emotional experiences affect social movement dynamics. We draw on our evidence to build models of how emotional dynamics create trajectories of development and decline in white supremacist group membership. To demonstrate the analytic leverage provided by a focus on emotional dynamics, we then examine three findings from our study that are difficult to explain through more common frameworks of individual cognit...