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

Abstract

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.