Hot Populism? Affective Responses to Antiestablishment Rhetoric

Abstract

Populist rhetoric is often portrayed as deeply emotional, aimed at provoking gut‐level, affective responses. It clearly enthuses some voters, while other voters clearly resent it. Yet we know very little about the affective responses that populist rhetoric actually evokes. For whom is populist rhetoric, particularly its antiestablishment component, arousing, and who has positive or negative affective responses? To analyze this, we study affective responses to antiestablishment and proestablishment rhetoric. We follow the circumplex model and conceptualize affective responses as arousal (measured with skin‐conductance levels) and valence (measured with facial electromyography [fEMG]). We use data (N = 343) collected at different sites (a music festival, the university lab, a religious gathering, a biker festival, a museum, and a fair) and our analyses are based on a preregistered analysis plan. We find no overall differences in affective responses to antiestablishment versus proestablishment rhetoric. We do find, however, that affective responses are conditional on vote choice and education level. Specifically, the lower educated respond with more arousal, and those who vote for the populist radical right also respond with more negative valence. These effects only manifest themselves vis‐à‐vis proestablishment rhetoric and, hence, suggest an incongruency effect. This raises the question of what constitutes the populist counterframe.