The Emotional Underpinnings of Populism: How Anger and Fear Affect Populist Attitudes

Abstract

Popular accounts of populist movements often point to negative emotions as a key motivating factor underlying their support. However, little systematic research has been devoted to examining differences in how distinct negative emotions affect levels of populism among voters. This paper attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the influence of the two emotions most frequently connected to populism in political commentary: fear and anger. Informed by appraisal theories of emotions, we hypothesize that populist attitudes are driven by feelings of anger, rather than fear. Using a three-wave online panel survey of Spanish citizens between 2014 and 2016, we find that anger expressed over the economic crisis is consistently associated with variations in support for populism both between individuals and over time, whereas no significant effects emerge for expressions of fear. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the nature of populist support.

Fear, Anger, and Voting for the Far Right: Evidence From the November 13, 2015 Paris Terror Attacks

“…A recent stream of research has shown that citizens experience heightened fear and anger in response to threats other than terrorism. These include economic conditions (Rico et al, ; Wagner, ), their country’s membership in supranational political institutions such as the EU (Vasilopoulou & Wagner, ), legislative acts (Valentino & Neuer, ), media content (MacKuen et al, ; Marcus et al, ) or politicians (Marcus & MacKuen, ; Marcus et al, ; Ragsdale, ). Other research has illustrated that fear and anger stemming from stimuli unrelated to politics also shape political decision making (Banks, ; Banks & Valentino, ).…”

“…Banks and Valentino () found that anger caused by a nonpolitical trigger primes racial considerations and, in turn, heightened opposition to redistributive policies such as affirmative action (Banks, ). Recently, Rico et al () found that angry voters were more likely to vote for antiestablishment populist parties, seeking to punish the political status quo. Finally, investigating the impact of emotions on attitudes toward the European Union in the United Kingdom, Vasilopoulou and Wagner () showed that anger was positively associated with support for leaving the EU, while fear was associated with the more moderate option of renegotiating the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EU.…”

The evolutionary psychology of mass mobilization: how disinformation and demagogues coordinate rather than manipulate

“…Also, authoritarian leaders are more likely to aggressively enforce collection action, thereby also providing a solution to the free-rider problem. Consistent with this coordination-for-aggression perspective on preferences for dominant leaders, such leader preferences are specifically predicted 7 by feelings of anger rather than, for example, fear (28,29,30), suggesting that people decide to follow dominant leaders to commit to an offensive strategy against the target group (28).…”

State of the field: How to study populism and adjacent topics? A plea for both more and less focus

“…; Fatke ) or emotions (Rico et al. ). This focus on the demand side leads to many new interesting questions and challenges.…”

“…1 Recent studies have built on these findings and investigated how to validly measure these attitudes (across cases) and how these attitudes affect vote choice Spruyt et al 2016;Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel 2018). In addition to focusing on voting behaviour and public opinion, scholars have also begun to investigate to what extent voting for populists has psychological roots in personality (Bakker et al 2016;Fatke 2019) or emotions (Rico et al 2017). This focus on the demand side leads to many new interesting questions and challenges.…”