Hot Populism? Affective Responses to Antiestablishment Rhetoric

Abstract

Populist rhetoric is often portrayed as deeply emotional, aimed at provoking gut‐level, affective responses. It clearly enthuses some voters, while other voters clearly resent it. Yet we know very little about the affective responses that populist rhetoric actually evokes. For whom is populist rhetoric, particularly its antiestablishment component, arousing, and who has positive or negative affective responses? To analyze this, we study affective responses to antiestablishment and proestablishment rhetoric. We follow the circumplex model and conceptualize affective responses as arousal (measured with skin‐conductance levels) and valence (measured with facial electromyography [fEMG]). We use data (N = 343) collected at different sites (a music festival, the university lab, a religious gathering, a biker festival, a museum, and a fair) and our analyses are based on a preregistered analysis plan. We find no overall differences in affective responses to antiestablishment versus proestablishment rhetoric. We do find, however, that affective responses are conditional on vote choice and education level. Specifically, the lower educated respond with more arousal, and those who vote for the populist radical right also respond with more negative valence. These effects only manifest themselves vis‐à‐vis proestablishment rhetoric and, hence, suggest an incongruency effect. This raises the question of what constitutes the populist counterframe.

Those were the what? Contents of nostalgia, relative deprivation and radical right support

“…Although the representative data reduced selection effects and its panel design accounted for time effects, the presented analyses do not allow for causal interpretations as in experimental designs (e.g., Van Prooijen et al., 2022). Besides omitted variable bias, such designs matter because radical right politicians drive emotions with their rhetoric (e.g., Schumacher et al., 2022; Widmann, 2021). Externally valid, natural experiments seem particularly promising for understanding causality better.…”

“…While populist politicians’ rhetoric suggests that support for this ideology is a function of many emotions (Widmann, 2021, but see Schumacher et al., 2022), it is important to acknowledge that single emotions have different action tendencies (Frijda et al., 1989) that, studied in isolation, help characterize voters’ emotional experience. Nostalgia, for instance, has at least two characteristics that differentiate it from the emotions mentioned above 2 .…”

Evaluating the status of theories of emotion in political science and psychology

“…Valence remains widely used by many without any acknowledgment of the challenges valence scholars have long failed to address. Those using valence simply disregard contrary evidence (Hibbing et al, 2014;Brandt et al, 2015;Fournier et al, 2020;Bellovary et al, 2021;Johnston and Madson, 2022;Schumacher et al, 2022).…”

Is Protest Only Negative? Examining the Effect of Emotions and Affective Polarization on Protest Behaviour

“…Our measure of respondents' emotions towards politics is captured by thermometer ratings. While other measurement strategies exist, such as facial or text/sentiment analysis, or physiological responses (Schumacher et al, 2022), ratings are best suited for large survey designs. Furthermore, it matches our choice of measurement of our second independent variable, affective polarization (see Section 3.4.2).…”