Anger Mediates the Effects of Fear on Support for the Far Right—A Rejoinder

Vasilopoulos, Pavlos; Marcus, George E.; Valentino, Nicholas A.; Foucault, Martial

doi:10.1111/pops.12598

Cited by 12 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…OR ϭ 1.040, 99% CI [1.019, 1.058]). They also sent more tweets with anger-related language, OR ϭ 1.041, 99% CI [1.019, 1.065], consistent with public opinion data suggesting that rightists tend to express more anger than leftists (Jost, 2019;Vasilopoulos et al, 2019). No ideological differences were observed in the use of positive emotion (H25) or anxiety language (H18; as reported above), contrary to expectations.…”

Section: Results For Emotional Expressionsupporting

confidence: 78%

“…Consistent with these ideas, Robinson and colleagues (2014) observed that liberals used more language related to anger than conservatives did, and conservatives used more language related to anxiety than liberals did. At the same time, public opinion research suggests that rightists may be more driven by anger (and fear), in comparison with leftists, so we considered this possibility as well (Jost, 2019;Vasilopoulos, Marcus, Valentino, & Foucault, 2019). Thus, we investigated the hypothesis proposed by Robinson et al (2014) that liberals would use more anger-related language than conservatives (H27) and (as noted above) that conservatives would use more anxiety-related language than liberals (H18).…”

Section: Emotional Expressionmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users.

Sterling¹,

Jost²,

Bonneau³

2020

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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For nearly a century social scientists have sought to understand left-right ideological differences in values, motives, and thinking styles. Much progress has been made, but-as in other areas of research-this work has been criticized for relying on small and statistically unrepresentative samples and the use of reactive, self-report measures that lack ecological validity. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we employed automated text analytic methods to investigate the spontaneous, naturally occurring use of language in nearly 25,000 Twitter users. We derived 27 hypotheses from the literature on political psychology and tested them using 32 individual dictionaries. In 23 cases, we observed significant differences in the linguistic styles of liberals and conservatives. For instance, liberals used more language that conveyed benevolence, whereas conservatives used more language pertaining to threat, power, tradition, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, and negative emotion in general. In 17 cases, there were also significant effects of ideological extremity. For instance, moderates used more benevolent language, whereas extremists used more language pertaining to inhibition, tentativeness, affiliation, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, negative affect, swear words, and death-related language. These research methods, which are easily adaptable, open up new and unprecedented opportunities for conducting unobtrusive research in psycholinguistics and political psychology with large and diverse samples.

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Section: Results For Emotional Expressionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Section: Emotional Expressionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users.

Sterling¹,

Jost²,

Bonneau³

2020

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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“…Counterintuitively, the present data also indicated a negative relationship between anxiety and RWPP support. This pattern corresponds to an ongoing discussion concerning the role of anger and anxiety on RWPP support (Jost, 2019;Vasilopoulos, Marcus, Valentino, & Foucault, 2019a, 2019b. Contrary to the stable relationship between anger and RWPP support, the present data support different interpretations on the role of anxiety (see Supplementary Materials for additional analysis).…”

Section: Affective Consequences Of Reduced Need Satisfaction and Theisupporting

confidence: 82%

Motivational and affective drivers of right-wing populism support: Insights from an Austrian presidential election

Lueders

Mühlberger

Jonas

2020

Soc. Psychol. Bull.

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Research has identified political disenchantment as an important driver for the recent spread of right-wing populism. The cultural backlash approach explains this relationship as a counter response to progressive socio-political developments in Western societies. Drawing on previous work, the present research examines motivational and affective factors underlying the support of right-wing populist parties. We hypothesize that a perceived alienation from the symbolic architecture of a society may decrease levels of psychological need satisfaction, which may catalyze into anxiety and anger. As the “political system” represents an important reflective surface for the socio-political status quo, we expected lower levels of need satisfaction and its resulting affective consequences to help explain the relationship between political disenchantment and right-wing populist support. We tested these tenets based on data from the 2016 Austrian presidential election (n = 626). The results of a structural equation model corroborated our predictions with some exceptions. Data indicated a negative relationship between political disenchantment and need satisfaction. Moreover, decreased need satisfaction was associated with increased self-reported anxiety and anger. Political disenchantment indirectly predicted support for a right-wing populist presidential candidate through decreased need satisfaction and anger, thus corroborating the role of anger as an important driver underlying right-wing populism support. Counterintuitively, the data indicated a negative relationship between anxiety and right-wing support. We discuss theoretical and practical implications, as well as limitations stemming from sample characteristics and the employed cross-sectional design.

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“…Further research may seek to disentangle the effect of SWB on each of these types of candidate. Research in social psychology has shown, for example, that negative emotions such as fear and anger contribute to support for right-wing, authoritarian candidates (e.g., Jost, 2019;Vasilopoulos, Marcus, Valentino, & Foucault, 2019). In general, we find the effects of low SWB to have been stronger in the primaries for Trump than for Sanders (whose populism did not incorporate an anti-immigrant strand), which provides some initial suggestive evidence for an ideological asymmetry whereby nativist right-wing populism draws in more unhappy people than left-wing, nonnativist strands of populism.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

(Un)happiness and voting in U.S. presidential elections.

Ward¹,

Neve²,

Ungar³

et al. 2021

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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A rapidly growing literature has attempted to explain Donald Trump's success in the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a result of a wide variety of differences in individual characteristics, attitudes, and social processes. We propose that the economic and psychological processes previously established have in common that they generated or electorally capitalized on unhappiness in the electorate, which emerges as a powerful high-level predictor of the 2016 electoral outcome. Drawing on a large dataset covering over 2 million individual surveys, which we aggregated to the county level, we find that low levels of evaluative, experienced, and eudaemonic subjective well-being (SWB) are strongly predictive of Trump's victory, accounting for an extensive list of demographic, ideological, and socioeconomic covariates and robustness checks. County-level future life evaluation alone correlates with the Trump vote share over Republican baselines at r ϭ Ϫ.78 in the raw data, a magnitude rarely seen in the social sciences. We show similar findings when examining the association between individual-level life satisfaction and Trump voting. Low levels of SWB also predict anti-incumbent voting at the 2012 election, both at the county and individual level. The findings suggest that SWB is a powerful high-level marker of (dis)content and that SWB should be routinely considered alongside economic explanations of electoral choice.

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Anger Mediates the Effects of Fear on Support for the Far Right—A Rejoinder

Cited by 12 publications

References 29 publications

Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users.

Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users.

Motivational and affective drivers of right-wing populism support: Insights from an Austrian presidential election

(Un)happiness and voting in U.S. presidential elections.

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