Concerns are raised repeatedly about the uncivil and simplistic way in which politicians often express their ideas. This political communication style runs counter to deliberative democratic virtues such as respectful interactions and well-justified arguments. Its use is therefore problematic from a normative point of view, yet there are indications that it is an effective communication style to persuade citizens. Two survey experimentstext and audiowere developed to investigate the effects of uncivil communication and simplistic argumentation on political trust and on persuasive power in political election debates. The results show that 1) uncivil communication lowers political trust and is slightly less convincing than civil communication, 2) simplistic argumentation, i.e. political arguments presented in ill-or nonjustified ways, does not affect political trust and is not more persuasive than well-justified argumentation, and 3) the strongest violation of social norms, i.e. a combined use of uncivil communication and simplistic argumentation, decreases both trust in the political candidate and persuasive power. Interestingly, politically cynical citizens and citizens who do not value inclusionary debates react differently to uncivil communication and simplistic argumentation: their level of trust does not decline and they are persuaded slightly more by simplistic arguments expressed in uncivil ways.

Concerns are raised repeatedly about the quality of televised debates. Both a country's electoral system and the presence of populist candidates have been argued to influence the deliberative qualities of these debates. By using an extended version of the Discourse Quality Index, this study conducts a content analysis of 12 televised election debates in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2009 and 2015. Against expectations, results show that politicians in multiparty systems do not use more justifications for policy positions and are not more respectful in the televised debates. Rather, this study uncovers a clear populist challenge to key deliberative debate qualities across party systems. Left-and right-wing populist politicians take more positions without proper justification and right-wing populists' presence in the televised debates increases the number of disrespectful interactions, lowering the deliberative qualities of the televised debates in different electoral contexts.

This study investigates how protest attitudes and ideological considerations affected the 2019 election results in Belgium, and particularly the vote for the radical right-wing populist party Vlaams Belang (VB) and for the radical left-wing populist party Partij van de Arbeid-Parti du Travail de Belgique (PVDA-PTB). Our results confirm that both protest attitudes and ideological considerations play a role to distinguish radical populist voters from mainstream party voters in general. However, when opposed to their second-best choice, we show that particularly protest attitudes matter. Moreover, in comparing radical right-and left-wing populist voters, the paper disentangles the respective weight of these drivers on the two ends of the political spectrum. Being able to portray itself as an alternative to mainstream can give these parties an edge among a certain category of voters, albeit this position is also difficult to hold in the long-run.

Previous research showed that political trust declines when politicians debate in uncivil ways. This article extends this research by analyzing how the news media’s tendency to focus on and even overstate incivility in post-debate coverage affects political trust and the news media’s own credibility. The results of two preregistered survey experiments show that politicians’ use of incivility decreases their perceived trustworthiness. The effects of incivility-focused news coverage on politicians’ perceived trustworthiness are more mixed with one experiment revealing a negative effect and one revealing no significant effect. Both experiments furthermore show that incivility-focused coverage decreases the news media’s own credibility.

Concerns are frequently raised about politicians’ increasing use of incivility. Yet, there is little longitudinal empirical work testing whether politicians’ use of incivility is actually rising, and little is known about the determinants that affect the prevalence of incivility. This study analyzes incivility over time and proposes a multi-layered framework of theoretically-driven incivility-inducing determinants. A quantitative content analysis of 4,102 speech acts in 24 Belgian televised election debates over the course of 35 years (1985–2019) shows that politicians’ incivility did not increase but occurs in a volatile pattern with ups and downs over the years. Confirmed by our analysis of the studied determinants, incivility shows to be highly context-specific. Particularly, incivility levels are affected both by characteristics of politicians, such as populism, incumbency, and gender, and by debate determinants, such as the topic under discussion, the number of politicians simultaneously debating each other, and previous incivility occurrences in the debate.