Abstract
The present research aimed to extend the existing literature on political extremes’ symmetries and asymmetries, by examining the relationship between political extremism and perceived societal anomie (i.e., perceptions that the leadership is disregulated and that the social fabric is disintegrated) across three studies conducted within French samples. The first two studies revealed that perceived leadership disregulation increased as participants position themselves toward either political extreme and was associated with greater support for proposals regarding protectionism and economic redistribution; indicating a symmetry between political extremes. However, perceived social fabric disintegration was not associated with political extremism but was stronger for far-right individuals; thus suggesting an asymmetry between the extremes. The last study, conducted before the 2017 French Presidential elections, showed that, when imagining a future society in which the candidate they supported is elected as President, political extremes, compared to moderates, similarly reported reduced levels of leadership disregulation, but not social fabric disintegration. The present findings therefore suggest both similarities and differences between political extremes’ perception of anomie within current and future French society and extend previous work showing that political extremes share negative views of society.
Highlights
The present research aimed to extend the existing literature on political extremes’ symmetries and asymmetries, by examining the relationship between political extremism and perceived societal anomie across three studies conducted within French samples
We entered the centered political orientation score and the quadratic term as predictors in two separate steps
The social fabric disintegration dimension of perceived anomie was not associated with political extremism nor with the support for radical political proposals in Study 2, whether right-wing oriented or more general
Summary
The present research aimed to extend the existing literature on political extremes’ symmetries and asymmetries, by examining the relationship between political extremism and perceived societal anomie (i.e., perceptions that the leadership is disregulated and that the social fabric is disintegrated) across three studies conducted within French samples. After a long scientific focus on the differences between right-wing and left-wing individuals, social and political psychology scholars have recently expressed a growing interest in the study of political extremes’ similarities (e.g., Greenberg & Jonas 2003; Krouwel et al 2017) Political extremes, despite their obvious ideological differences, might share some features regarding how they process information (e.g., Lammers et al 2017) and how they perceive the social world (e.g., van der Bles et al 2018). In line with extant data showing that political extremes share negative perceptions of society (e.g., van der Bles et al 2018), we examined whether they would display higher perceptions that society is anomic than more moderates
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