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How can we explain the persuasiveness of populist messages, and who are most susceptible to their effects? These questions remain largely unanswered in extant research. This study argues that populist messages are characterized by assigning blame to elites in an emotionalized way. As previous research pointed at the guiding influence of blame attributions and emotions on political attitudes, these message characteristics may explain populism’s persuasiveness. An experiment using a national sample (N = 721) was conducted to provide insights into the effects of and mechanisms underlying populist blame attribution with regard to the European and national levels of governance. The results show that emotionalized blame attributions influence both blame perceptions and populist attitudes. Identity attachment moderates these effects: Emotionalized blame attributions have the strongest effects for citizens with weaker identity attachments. These insights allow us to understand how populist messages affect which citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "trap" effect is the alleged ability of television (a) to disseminate political information to those who are not interested in politics and (b) to influence them more strongly than other channels of political information, such as newspapers, can. These ideas are tested in 12 European countries for the campaign of the European election in 1999: Was television really more powerful than newspapers among the many citizens who did not care about that election? The authors' analyses show that the trap power of television was far from being impressive. Also, seemingly favorable national conditions for a trap effect of television, such as more TV news coverage on the European elections and fewer TV channels to evade that coverage, did not help. Instead, personal conversations better persuaded the uninterested to turn out and vote than television (and newspapers) did. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]