Angry Voters Research Articles

The angry voter? The role of emotions in voting for the radical left and right at the 2019 Belgian elections

This study examines the role of negative (anger, fear) and positive emotions in addition to political attitudes (political trust, populist attitudes, external political efficacy) as key determinants of voting behaviour. We rely on the RepResent voter survey conducted in 2019 in Belgium ( n = 3236) allowing us to assess the relationship between emotions, political attitudes, and the vote for radical right (VB, PP) and radical left parties (PTB-PVDA). Findings indicate that anger is significantly and positively related to voting for radical left and right parties, while controlling for key political attitudes and issue positions. Fear and positive emotions are not significantly more related to voting for radical parties than for other parties. The results suggest that anger should be more systematically integrated in electoral research. These findings call for further analysis on the causal mechanism linking emotions and voting behaviour, and the (in)direct effects of emotions on voting.

It’s the Moral Economy, Stupid! Anger Toward Economic Inequality and Populist Voting

The present study sets out to investigate the mechanism by which ordinary citizens are moved to anger toward economic inequality, and its political consequences. Since anger toward economic inequality is triggered by the perception that core distributive norms have been violated, it is argued that this emotional response mainly benefits political parties who defend redistributive values and establish clear responsibility for their violation. Results from twenty-six ISSP countries provide strong evidence that angry citizens are more inclined to vote for economically progressive populist parties and for economically progressive pluralist parties than for parties taking conservative stances on economic issues. This study thus lends empirical support to the assumption that populist parties attract angry voters by speaking the language of moral economy.

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

Does Household Finance Affect the Political Process? Evidence from Voter Turnout During a Housing Crisis

Abstract I examine the effect of house price declines on voter participation using a novel person-level panel data set. Contrary to what the “angry voter hypothesis” predicts, I find that a 10% decline in local house prices decreases the participation rate of the average mortgaged homeowner by 1.6 percentage points. Consistent with a financial distress channel, house price declines have no effects on renters and particularly severe effects on highly leveraged households. My findings are consistent with the existence of a feedback loop between financial distress and inequality operating through voter participation.

Tweeted Anger Predicts County-Level Results of the 2016 United States Presidential Election

In the aftermath of the 2016 United States presidential election, experts and journalists speculated that angry voters had supported the unexpected winner Donald Trump. The present study used a sample of 148 million tweets posted by U.S. citizens from across 1,347 counties, classified with regard to emotional content, to predict the election results at county level. As expected, Donald Trump received more support in counties where people tweeted more anger and negative emotions, even when various county characteristics and conservative vote choice in the preceding presidential election were controlled. These findings might be an outcome of emotional resonance—voters being attracted by political appeals that match their emotions—because Trump used more anger and negative emotion words in his campaign than the other presidential candidates in 2012 and 2016. The findings suggest that negative emotions played a critical role in the 2016 presidential election.

Household Financial Distress and Voter Participation

I examine the effect of house price declines on voter participation using a novel person-level panel dataset. Contrary to what the “angry voter hypothesis” predicts, I find that a ten percent decline in local house prices decreases the participation rate of the average mortgaged homeowner by 1.6 percentage points. Consistent with a financial distress channel, house price declines have no effects on renters and particularly severe effects on highly leveraged households. My findings are consistent with the existence of a feedback loop between financial distress and inequality operating through voter participation.

An expressive voting model of anger, hatred, harm and shame

To consider some political implications of angry voters, we alter the standard expressive model in a fundamental way. One result is that an angry voter with a strong sense of shame at the thought of voting to harm others, may still do so, even when the harm is brutal. Indeed, his willingness to vote for harming others may increase if the proposed harm becomes more severe, even though the angry voter is more “decent” (less willing to harm others) than most of us sometimes are. Several examples are given that are consistent with the most troubling implications of the model. An empirical appendix follows the concluding section which tests the implications of the model indirectly.

AFRICAN HUMAN MOBILITY REVIEW

On a recent visit to Washington DC, I had an animated discussion with a taxi driver who was an avid supporter of Donald Trump. The driver was not the stereotypical white, middle-aged, small-town, working-class, non-collegeeducated, angry voter who put Trump in the White House. Rather, he was a former television producer and poet from India who had immigrated to the US in the 1990s, and was adamant that Trump would stop the “flood of illegal aliens†into the country. His vigorous defence of Trump was a surprise, as was his buy-in to Trump’s anti-immigrant discourse of threat. There are few issues in the contemporary world that generate so much uninformed debate and misinformation as immigration (Blinder, 2015; de Haas, 2008; Hellwig and Sinno, 2017; Valentino et al., 2013).

The Myth of the Angry Voters: Parliamentary Election in Slovak Republic

Abstract The recent parliamentary elections which took place in The Slovak Republic in March 2016 opened for many national and international commentators the bottled of demons from the past history of Slovakia. For the first time a Far right extremist political party entered into parliament and held seats there. They gained more than some standard political parties and also were not dubbed as the “black” horse of this election. As they were not measured by public opinion. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the fundamental purpose of voters that had elected this political party and on the other hand the main reason that has opened the parliamentary door to such a political entity that was not visible in the previous electoral periods or played any important role in the independence of Slovak republic. Our main assumption will be that which is taken from the media analysis before the parliamentary election and public opinion research. Our main variable from the external environment will be the migration refugee crisis and the rhetoric of political parties acting at national level. We can assume that this was one of the main reason for the entry of this political party within others which were “hidden” or covered by this crisis and were not mediatized in the media.

Forms of Expression of Angry Voters and Sad Voters: The Effects of Discrete Emotions and Emotional Expression on the Voting Participation through Approach-Avoidance Action Tendencies

Despite the proliferation of studies on emotion, little attention has been paid to the effects of discrete emotion on political participation. Using a representative survey conducted on a sample of South Korean citizens in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry accident, the current survey explored how anger and sadness, as well as the ways people express those emotions, influence the orientation of their response in social environments and, ultimately, their voting intention. The results partially supported the discrete effects of sadness and anger in eliciting reactions of approach or avoidance. Anger was found to provoke an approach action tendency in independent voters and supporters of the opposition, while also eliciting an avoidance action tendency with a varying effect size across all three groups of respondents. Sadness also prompted an approach action tendency in independents and supporters of the incumbent party, while it manifested a negative association with the avoidance action tendency in supporters of the opponent party. An interpretation of the findings and proposed directions for future research are presented.

Emotions and voting in EU referendums

There is an emerging scholarship on the emotional bases of political opinion and behaviour and, in particular, the contrasting implications of two distinct negative emotions – anger and anxiety. I apply the insights in this literature to the previously unresearched realm of the emotional bases of voting in EU referendums. I hypothesise that anxious voters rely on substantive EU issues and angry voters rely on second-order factors relating to domestic politics (partisanship and satisfaction with government). Focusing on the case of Irish voting in the Fiscal Compact referendum, and using data from a representative sample of voters, I find support for the hypotheses and discuss the implications of the findings for our understanding of the emotional conditionality of EU referendum voting.

Orchestrating a Low-Carbon Energy Revolution Without Nuclear: Germany’s Response to the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis

In October 2010, the German conservative ruling coalition (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Socialist Union (CDU/CSU) and Free Democratic Party (FDP)) passed a law permitting the extension of contracts for Germany’s seventeen nuclear power plants. This policy amended a law passed in 2001 by a Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Green Party majority to phase out nuclear energy by the early 2020s. The explosions in the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility, however, resulted in a decision to speed up the phaseout of nuclear energy. The nuclear meltdowns in Japan sent hundreds of thousands of protesters onto the streets. Angry voters made their disillusionment with the nuclear politics of the conservative government coalition clear in local elections. The federal government responded by setting up an Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply, which recommended an end to nuclear energy and a shift to a renewable energy-based economy. Within months of the Fukushima disaster, the government had permanently shut down eight of the country’s oldest nuclear power plants and issued a schedule for the phased shutdown of the remaining nine plants by 2022. In addition, the government reaffirmed its climate change plans, which call for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by around forty percent of 1990 levels by 2020 and eighty percent by 2050. Thus, out of a crisis, the German government is forging an opportunity to become a global leader in the promotion of new renewable energies, energy efficiency, and greenhouse gas emission reductions. In Japan, the nuclear crisis has also weakened support for nuclear energy, but with a strong industrial coalition calling for its continued use, both for energy stability and in response to climate change, a complete nuclear phaseout is less certain, at least in the short term.

Does Television Erode Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam

During the past thirty-five years many commentators have expressed concern about declining support for the American political system, noting familiar evidence of the steady erosion in electoral turnout (Stanley and Niemi 1995, 78; Teixeira 1992), falling participation in political parties (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), plummeting levels of political trust (Lipset and Schneider 1987), and weakening civic engagement (Putnam 1995a). Evidence for declining confidence in American government is well-established. The standard National Election Study measures show that in 1954 three-quarters of the American public trusted government in Washington to do what was right ‘just about always or most of the time’. By 1994, a quarter of the public proved as trusting. Moreover how far Americans trust each other—or social trust—has also fallen by more than a third since the early sixties (Uslaner 1995; Putnam 1995a).Not all the evidence points in the same direction, and some alternative forms of political activity may have risen over time (Verba et al. 1995, 70–71). Moreover comparative research (Klingemann and Fuchs 1995) provides no evidence for a uniform secular decline in electoral turnout and confidence in government across advanced democracies, as sometimes assumed by observers. Nevertheless it is widely believed that American democracy has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, with angry voters disillusioned by Washington politics as usual.

Does Television Erode Social Capital? A Reply to Putnam

During the past thirty-five years many commentators have expressed concern about declining support for the American political system, noting familiar evidence of the steady erosion in electoral turnout (Stanley and Niemi 1995, 78; Teixeira 1992), falling participation in political parties (Rosenstone and Hansen 1993), plummeting levels of political trust (Lipset and Schneider 1987), and weakening civic engagement (Putnam 1995a). Evidence for declining confidence in American government is well-established. The standard National Election Study measures show that in 1954 three-quarters of the American public trusted government in Washington to do what was right ‘just about always or most of the time’. By 1994, a quarter of the public proved as trusting. Moreover how far Americans trust each other—or social trust—has also fallen by more than a third since the early sixties (Uslaner 1995; Putnam 1995a).Not all the evidence points in the same direction, and some alternative forms of political activity may have risen over time (Verba et al. 1995, 70–71). Moreover comparative research (Klingemann and Fuchs 1995) provides no evidence for a uniform secular decline in electoral turnout and confidence in government across advanced democracies, as sometimes assumed by observers. Nevertheless it is widely believed that American democracy has been experiencing a crisis of legitimacy, with angry voters disillusioned by Washington politics as usual.

Politicians, Voters, and Trade

In Democracy and International Trade: Britain, France and the United States, 1860-1990, Daniel Verdier develops a general theory for explaining how trade policy is generated in democratic states. Eschewing traditional approaches to trade policy formation, Verdier argues that the key to understanding trade politics in democratic countries is the voter. Voters count because it is they who ultimately determine the constraints under which politicians seek and hold office. Competitive elections not only force office-seeking politicians to search out and articulate voter preferences in order to construct winning electoral coalitions, they also constrain officeholding politicians once they have attained power. Politicians who renege on campaign promises risk being thrown out by angry voters in the next election. As a result, the electoral connection ensures that voter preferences about trade policy become embodied in the strategies and behavior of both officeholders and office seekers. In democracies, Verdier contends, 'voters are sovereign (p. 294). Verdier's electoral delegation argument is both insightful and compelling. He argues that elections do not determine the specific content of trade policy, as is commonly thought, but rather the latitude with which officeholding politicians can formulate and pursue trade policy. When trade policy is central to building and maintaining a winning electoral coalition, politicians become highly constrained by voter preferences. Moreover, the need to maintain coalition unity forces politicians to articulate and pursue general policies (such as free trade) that reflect the interests of voters in broad economic classes, such as farmers, labor, or business. As trade policy becomes less salient to voters, however, the constraints on politicians loosen. This enables them to pursue particularistic policies that meet the demands of more narrowly defined economic interests, such as sector specific subsidies. Finally, when trade is highly salient to voters and becomes linked to an external security threat, the executive gains great autonomy to use trade policy as an instrument for pursuing national survival. In short, the nature, strength, and distribution of preferences within the electorate determines both the general content of trade policy and the basic form of trade politics. Thus, Verdier subsumes within a single framework models of trade politics based on class or party politics (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967), pressure politics (Schattschneider, 1935), and executive politics.* Verdier's argument is compelling because it focuses directly upon the distinctive feature of democracy-competitive elections-as key to understanding the policy process. It makes the critical-and all too often overlooked-point that politicians

What Happened to the Populist Vote? A California Case Study

During the turbulent four years that opened the 1890s, nearly one-and-a-half million angry voters deserted the Democratic and Republican parties to join one of the most successful third-party movements in American history. Spawned by hard times, the People's party, better known as the Populists, quickly won a large following composed primarily of economically distressed and rebellious farmers in the South and West. In 1892, Populist presidential candidate James B. Weaver polled over a million popular votes and carried five western states with a total of twenty-two electoral votes, a remarkable showing. During the course of the 1890s, Populists elected governors in eight western states, sent six of their candidates to the United States Senate, and elected at least forty more to the House of Representatives.1 These Populist successes forced a worried Democratic party to respond by nominating agrarian crusader William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska for the presidency in 1896. Although the Great Commoner went on to a resounding defeat at the hands of Republican William McKinley, the selection of Bryan on a watered-down Populist platform calling for free silver proved quite successful as a strategy for co-opting the Populist move-

The World of Ways and Means: A Conversation with Dan Rostenkowski

Prologue: For almost a decade now, Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-IL) has chaired the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. During his stewardship, the committee has fashioned laws that address some of the most controversial and critical issues facing American society, including reform measures dealing with taxes, trade, welfare, and Medicare. These struggles have made Rostenkowski's name a household word in America. But political life has not been an easy road for him. A recent profile by The New York Times recounted his difficulties under a headline that read, “Tax Mutiny, Angry Voters and Less Indignities: Suddenly, a Powerful Congressman Is Stumbling.” But Rostenkowski seems to take these incidents largely in stride. In this interview, Rostenkowski makes clear that addressing health policy issues that vex the nation is definitely on his agenda. When asked this question specifically, he responded: “The health system has some very serious problems that we will ultimately have to address. At some point, and I hope it's soon, we will take the necessary steps to ensure everyone has access to basic health care. The challenge is figuring out how to do this and pay for it—and, at the same time, get some control over escalating costs while preserving incentives for medical innovation and continued improvement in the quality of care. At the moment, unfortunately, political and economic barriers to reform seem quite insurmountable. But, pressure is mounting, and changes will come. I don't know exactly when, or in what direction, but I will welcome and support reform. Until then, my primary responsibility is to make sure that health services are available to the urban poor.” Above all, Rostenkowski is human. He has an abiding interest in his Polish-American heritage and has long been a strong supporter of Poland. Rostenkowski reflected his attachment to Poland last November at a House dinner honoring Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, when he wept with genuine regret as he spoke of the years spent trying to play down his Polishness and to “Anglo-Saxonize” himself.