This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset.

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Populist parties increasingly take a welfare chauvinistic position. They criticize mainstream parties for cutting and slashing welfare at the expense of the 'native' population and to the benefit of the 'undeserving' immigrant. Given the electoral success of populist parties, we investigate whether and when mainstream parties ignore, attack or accommodate welfare chauvinism.Using key theories of party behaviour, we test whether mainstream parties (1) respond immediately to populist parties, (2) respond with a time lag, or (3) respond only when they lose elections or are in opposition. Our quantitative analyses of party manifestos, speeches and policies of European mainstream and populist parties show that mainstream parties adapt to populist parties on welfare chauvinism, but which parties adapt and when varies significantly. In our in-depth examinations of the Dutch and Danish cases, we highlight important cross-country and cross-party differences.The electoral rise of populist parties in Western Europe is by now a well-established fact (

What are the psychological roots of support for populist parties or outfits such as the Tea Party, the Dutch Freedom Party or Germany's Die Linke? Populist parties have as common denominator that they employ an anti-establishment message, which they combine with some 'host' ideology. Building on the elective affinity metaphor we expect that a voter's personality should match with the message and position of her party. We theorize that a low score on the personality trait Agreeableness matches with the anti-establishment message and should predict voting for populist parties. We find evidence for this hypothesis in the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. The relationship between low Agreeableness and voting for populist parties is robust controlling for other personality traits, authoritarianism, socio-demographic characteristics and ideology. Thus, explanations of the success of populism should take personality traits into account. According to political psychology research, factors such as ideology and cynicism are rooted in personality (Gerber et al., 2010; Jost et al., 2003; Mondak & Halperin, 2008). The 'elective affinity model', assumes that the association between psychological dispositions and political attitudes is a 'functional match' between the symbolic nature of a political issue and Notes1 The Tea Party is a faction within a party.3 the goals and motives of personality traits (Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004; Jost et al., 2009). We expand this argument and theorize that a person is drawn to a populist party when the antiestablishment message of this party resonates with one's personality. When assessing an individual's personality, researchers often make use of the Big Five personality traits, which is a taxonomy of temperament and behavior that identifies five traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism (Digman, 1990;Goldberg, 1992). We push this research one step further by hypothesizing that voting for populists is rooted in low Agreeableness. Because low agreeable individuals are inclined to be highly skeptical of the behavior of others, they are highly sensitive to populist parties' antiestablishment message and therefore inclined to support these parties.To test our argument, we report survey evidence from the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. These countries have a diverse set of successful populists: the antigovernment Tea Party (US), the welfare chauvinist and anti-immigrant Freedom Party (Netherlands) and the left-wing Die Linke (Germany). We report systematic negative correlations between Agreeableness and support for a populist party. We control for a host of additional interpretations -ideology, socio-economic background, authoritarianism and the other Big Five traits -but find systematic evidence for an independent effect of Agreeableness on populist voting. This is an important finding, because we demonstrate (1) that populist voters do not have an authoritarian personality such as supporters of fascist outfits and (2) that popul...

About a decade ago a study documented that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. This work launched a paradigm aimed at uncovering the biological roots of ideology. Despite wide-ranging scientific and popular impact, independent laboratories have not replicated the study. We conducted a preregistered direct replication (N=202) and conceptual replications in the United States (N=352) and the Netherlands (N=81). Our analyses do not support the conclusions of the original study, nor do we find evidence for broader claims regarding the effect of disgust and the existence of a physiological trait. Rather than studying unconscious responses as the "real" predispositions, alignment between conscious and unconscious responses promise deeper insights in the emotional roots of ideology. Main In a study published by Science, Oxley et al. 1 demonstrate that individuals who express conservative political attitudes (e.g., a preference for tradition, clear group boundaries, and hierarchies) have stronger physiological reactions to threatening stimuli than those who express liberal views. One of the authors' explanations for this association is that "political attitudes and varying physiological responses to threat may both derive from neural activity patterns" (p.1669), 1 suggesting a biological basis for the robust, positive correlation between political conservatism and self-reported measures of sensitivity to uncertainty and threat 2-5. Research by others, including the Oxley, et al. research team, demonstrates that conservatives also have stronger physiological responses to disgusting stimuli than liberals do 6, 7. These findings motivated members of the Oxley, et al. research team to further elaborate that conservatism is linked to a more expansive form of "negativity bias" at a physiological level 9. This research helped usher in a new paradigm in psychology and political science that offers a provocative perspective on the biological roots of the centuries-old liberal/conservative divide 8. It implies that psychological traits, such as "threat sensitivity", "disgust sensitivity", and "negativity bias" can be captured in a straightforward and unobtrusive way with physiological reactions, and that these "physiological traits" have a direct and unmediated effect on