Why feelings trump facts: anti-politics, citizenship and emotion

Flinders, Matthew

doi:10.1332/263168919x15761256384386

Cited by 18 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Even though emotions also matter for voters of non-populist parties, emotions have perhaps been most significant in explaining the success of populist parties (Canovan 1999;Flinders 2020;Salmelavon Scheve 2017). For example, Minogue (1969: 197) claims that to "understand the (populist) movement is to discover the feelings which moved people".…”

Section: Emotions and Voting For Populist Parties: The Role Of Anger ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, Anger, Hope, and Pride: Negative and Positive Emotions in Electoral Behaviour

Saxonberg¹,

Frič²,

Gyárfášová³

2023

sociologia

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Fear, Anger, Hope, and Pride: Negative and Positive Emotions in Electoral Behaviour. It is becoming increasingly clear that emotions play a crucial role in voting decisions. This is especially true when it comes to choosing populist parties. This article uses a unique dataset to analyse the interplay between emotions and support for various types of populist parties in Slovakia. It contributes to the discourse by testing the competing hypotheses on what kinds of emotions matter in a post-communist country with multiple types of populist parties. Our results show that although previous studies have tended to concentrate on emotions toward the political or economic situation, feelings toward political leaders actually have greater importance, at least in the Slovak, post-communist context. Our study also indicates that the types of emotions differ depending on whether the populist party has already been in power or not. Contrary to expectations, fear has played a more important role than anger and in general, emotions are more important for rightwing and leftwing populist parties than for nonpopulist or centrist populist parties.

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Section: Emotions and Voting For Populist Parties: The Role Of Anger ...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, Anger, Hope, and Pride: Negative and Positive Emotions in Electoral Behaviour

Saxonberg¹,

Frič²,

Gyárfášová³

2023

sociologia

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“…It also helps explain Trump’s entry to the apex of American politics and the attractiveness of Trump’ ism to large sections of the American public. Trump’s brand of simplistic ‘Us’ and ‘Them’/‘America First’ politics offered a clear emotional connection to those who felt the system was unfair, stacked against them and therefore that they had little to lose by taking an electoral risk (see Flinders, 2020). Put slightly different, Trump was not the problem and it is arguably more accurate to suggest that his rise to the presidency was simply symptomatic of a deeper social malady.…”

Section: The ‘I’-‘we’-‘i’ Arc Of the Twentieth Centurymentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratic Decline and the Politics of the Upswing: How the United States May Have Come Together a Century Ago but Can It Do It Again?

Flinders

2021

Political Studies Review

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Robert Putman’s The Upswing (written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) provides a powerful meta-analysis of American social, political, economic and cultural change throughout the twentieth century. What this analysis reveals is the existence of an almost perfect arc of social progress which begins from a low position around the Gilded Age at the beginning of the twentieth century and then climbs across all variables until reaching a highpoint around 1960. The Progressive Era, Putnam argues, engineered an ‘upswing’ against inequality, polarisation, social disarray and a culture of self-centredness. Since then, however, the data suggest that a severe downswing has occurred which explains the existence of deep divisions and polarised politics in the United States. Putnam’s core argument is simple: The United States has pulled itself out of a trough before and it can do it again. In a post-Trump context, this argument could hardly be more welcome which may explain the rave reviews this book has generally received. Nevertheless, the core weakness of The Upswing is that it arguably tells us far more about how the United States ‘came together a century ago’ but far less about how it ‘can do it again’ in the future.

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“…The benefit of this re-reading is that it chimes with this article's argument about GE2019 not simply being about Brexit but about Boris' ability to tap into a deeper pool of public disillusionment. Although intuitively challenging, it could be argued that Boris, or more specifically those around him, was able to recognise and resonate with the changing emotional landscape of British politics and it was this that ultimately led to the success of the Conservative Party in Labour's traditional heartlands (see Flinders, 2020).…”

Section: Funnelling Frustration and Populism 'Uk-style'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Not a Brexit Election? Pessimism, Promises and Populism ‘UK-Style’

Flinders

2020

Parliamentary Affairs

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The Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom once warned against 'the danger of self-evident truths' and suggested that 'the fact that something is widely believed does not make it correct ' (2000, p.33). The role of the social and political scientist was, for Ostrom, not simply to examine and explore a specific topic, event or theme but also to be constantly aware of the need to step back and question, challenge and disrupt the dominant lens through which the object of analysis is generally conceived. This article injects Ostrom's provocative plea into the sphere of British politics in order to question the 'self-evident truth' that GE2019 was 'a Brexit election'. The 'danger' of accepting this interpretation is that it is arguably too obvious, too simple, too cosmetic. It risks over-emphasising the visible machinations of recent events while at the same time under-emphasising and failing to expose the deeper socio-political roots, tensions and drivers that manifested themselves in GE2019. Put slightly differently, to accept GE2019 as a Brexit election is to focus on the tip of the iceberg while the aim of this article is to look beneath the (political) waterline. As such, the central argument of this chapter is that GE2019 was not a Brexit election but a disaffection election. This is an argument that demands a little unpacking. To some extent GE2019 was very clearly 'a Brexit election' for the simple reason that '[f]or most voters, how they cast their ballot in 2019 reflected where they stood in the Brexit debate' (Curtice, 2000, p.12). As such, the election proved an effective way of breaking the legislative deadlock that had emerged at Westminster and the contextual relevance of Brexit cannot be overlooked. And yet, stepping-back (qua. Ostrom) it is possible to question this 'selfevident truth' from at least two perspectives. First, as the work of David Cutts and his colleagues (2020) has demonstrated the outcome of GE2019 was shaped by a variety of long-term factors concerning shifts in the sources of support for the main parties, most of which pre-date Brexit. When viewed from a historical perspective -and as Andrew Gamble has emphasised (2019) -Boris Johnson's need to attract working class voters in Northern English towns was hardly a new challenge for the party, even

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Why feelings trump facts: anti-politics, citizenship and emotion

Cited by 18 publications

References 8 publications

Fear, Anger, Hope, and Pride: Negative and Positive Emotions in Electoral Behaviour

Fear, Anger, Hope, and Pride: Negative and Positive Emotions in Electoral Behaviour

Democratic Decline and the Politics of the Upswing: How the United States May Have Come Together a Century Ago but Can It Do It Again?

Not a Brexit Election? Pessimism, Promises and Populism ‘UK-Style’

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