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Several studies have examined the relationship between Authoritarianism and prejudice. Only very few of them, however, have examined how Authoritarianism relates to actual far-right support. By means of a survey experiment we test whether the effect of Authoritarianism on far-right support is conditional on whether Authoritarianism is activated by a threatening message.

Several studies have examined the relationship between the Big Five personality traits Agreeableness and Openness to experience on the one hand and nativism/prejudice and populism on the other hand. Only very few of them, however, have examined how nativist and populist threats can activate these relationships. By means of a survey experiment we test whether the effects of Agreeableness and Openness on support for populist and nativist attitudes and parties is conditional on exposure to threatening messages.

We talk about nationalism with Bart Bonikowski. Guest host Neda Magbouleh.

A discussion of the federal government shutdown.

Modern economies are experiencing major changes, including labor dislocation, as a result of a new wave of automation and artificial intelligence (AI). This paper is designed to address a key question: Does providing information about the trade-offs of automation affect support for automation and for different policies in response to it? We will use a combination of survey and conjoint experiments across four advanced economies (Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US), with a sample of roughly 8,000 individuals, to answer this question. Each respondent will be randomized into either a control scenario, a news article treatment, or a conjoint information treatment. In the news article treatment individuals will read, in sensational terms, about the costs of automation only, i.e., the job losses, but will not be given information on the benefits. In the conjoint information treatment, rather than just emphasizing costs, we will provide a broader picture of the potential effects of automation, designing different scenarios where we vary the numbers of winners and losers (in terms of final products’ price changes as well as changes in the number of employed workers) to then infer people’s preferences over policy responses to automation. In answering this question, we anticipate that perceptions of automation, as well as preferred policy responses, will vary across respondents by subjective and objective risk of automation, gender, and knowledge.

Political messages can have consequences for public opinion and support for certain parties. To what extent do populist, nativist and multiculturalist messages affect public opinion on related matters? And to what extent do they have an effect on support for parties expressing such messages? We expect that when people are exposed to a populist/nativist/multiculturalist message, they will (1) become more supportive of the corresponding views and the parties that typically espouse them, and (2) be less likely to endorse contradictory views and opposing parties.

Past research has shown suggestive evidence of cross-domain spillover between populism and nativism, whereby exposure to populist frames increases nativist attitudes and exposure to nativist frames increases populist attitudes. The robustness of these findings has been mixed, however, with stronger effects of populism on nativism demonstrated in the U.S. than the Netherlands and the spillover effects being sensitive to choices of dependent variables and moderator variables in both countries. In this study, we intend to shed light on these mixed findings using survey experiments administered in 2021 in the Netherlands. Specifically, our study will (a) replicate the spillover effect of populism on nativism; (b) examine whether nativism has comparable spillover effects on populism; (c) test three theoretically plausible moderation effects; and (d) identify possible mechanisms driving these cross-domain associations. With respect to mechanisms, past studies disagree on whether cross-domain spillover is a result of respondents’ intrinsic tendency toward ingroup-outgroup thinking or their pre-experimental exposure to political discourse that bundles populism with nativism, effectively fusing these two phenomena in respondents’ minds. Our study seeks to distinguish between these alternative causal pathways.

Although it is well established that there are substantial differences in political opinions and voting behaviour according to people’s social position, there is much work needed to addresses the effects of the fit between the so-called ‘demand side of politics’ and the discourse of political actors (the so-called ‘supply side of politics’). Therefore, in this study we aim to assess whether people’s economic and/or educational positions moderate the effect of populist and/or nativist messages on people’s socio-political attitudes. The experimentally manipulated salience of populist and/or nativist messages are seen as contextually salient, that is, they are made salient through the elements of the (interview) context. We argue that people’s economic and educational positions can be seen as indicators of the ‘chronic salience’ (that is, the extent to which people encounter situations in which populist and nativist messages are salient on a more or less permanent basis) of populist and nativist messages. In that context, chronic salience relates to people’s social network (and the attitudes/views that are prevalent in that network) for which we aim to compare the effects of income vs. education.

The literature on anti-immigrant attitudes and social exclusion has typically focused on the role of religious, ethnic, racial, and cultural boundaries. According to standard arguments in the literature, immigrants perceived as distant from the native population on these criteria are particularly likely to be viewed unfavorably, especially by those who subscribe to ascriptive definitions of nationhood. What this research tradition has not attended to, however, is the role of geopolitical rivalries in shaping anti-immigrant exclusion. Negative evaluations of countries that are perceived as the focal nation-state’s geopolitical foes can spill over onto those countries’ emigrant populations, so that immigrants from those countries are seen as dangerous, untrustworthy, and undesirable. Indeed, such stigma can influence views of immigrants even in the absence of other bases of difference, such as religion, race, or culture. Immigrants who belong to the same racial or religious categories as the majority of the domestic population may become stigmatized primarily on the basis of being perceived as “enemies” on the geopolitical stage. In this study we investigate the role of geopolitical rivalries on immigration attitudes by administering a conjoint experiment to survey respondents from 22 countries (more details below). The experiment places the respondent in the role of a hypothetical immigration officer who must evaluate pairs of applicants for permanent residency. The applicants vary on several characteristics, including country of origin, with the country sets including a 2x2 combination of geopolitical foes and allies and racial/ethnic similarity and difference. Identifying the marginal component effects of country of origin will allow us to evaluate our central research question. Pre-treatment items measuring nationalist attitudes enable us to examine treatment effect heterogeneity.

A viral speech calls for the need to tax the rich.

Modern economies are beginning to experience large-scale labour disruption through a new wave of automation and artificial intelligence (AAI). While previous waves of automation were largely concentrated in routine work, the present wave is anticipated to affect more occupations and income levels. In this project, we administer a series of survey experiments in ten advanced industrial countries—Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, Poland, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, and the United States—to understand how people respond to AAI-related economic dislocation as compared to other labour market shocks, and what policies they prefer in response to economic change.

Using online survey experiments, we examine whether exposure to populist political claims increases out-group antipathy in the United States.

Radical-right parties and candidates combine three discursive elements in their electoral appeals: anti-elite populism, exclusionary and declinist nationalism, and illiberal authoritarianism. Recent studies have explored whether these frames have diffused from radical-right to centrist parties in the latters effort to compete for the formers voters. This paper investigates the obverse process: the radical rights (specifically, Donald Trumps) reliance on discursive elements that had long been present in mainstream institutional politics. To do so, we identify instances of populism, nationalism (i.e., exclusionary and inclusive definitions of national symbolic boundaries and displays of low and high national pride), and authoritarianism in the speeches of Democratic and Republican presidential nominees between 1952 and 2016. These frames are subtle, infrequent, and polysemic, which makes their quantitative measurement difficult. We overcome this by leveraging the affordances of cutting-edge neural language models; in particular, we combine a variant of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (RoBERTa) with active learning. As we demonstrate, this approach is considerably more powerful than other methods commonly used by social scientists to measure discursive frames. Our results suggest that what set Donald Trumps campaign apart from those of mainstream presidential candidates was not its invention of a new form of politics, but its combination of negative evaluations of elites, low national pride, and authoritarianism---all of which had long been present among both parties---with an explicit evocation of exclusionary nationalism, which had previously been used only in coded form. Radical-right discourse therefore appears to be less a break with the past and more an amplification and creative rearrangement of existing political-cultural tropes.

Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-cps-10.1177_00104140211060284 for Moralizing Immigration: Political Framing, Moral Conviction, and Polarization in the United States and Denmark by Kristina B. Simonsen, and Bart Bonikowski in Comparative Political Studies

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-eup-10.1177_1465116521992876 for Populist and nativist attitudes: Does ingroup/outgroup thinking spill over across domains? by Matthijs Rooduijn, Bart Bonikowski and Jante Parlevliet in European Union Politics