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More aggressive campaigning styles focusing on criticizing opponents (negativity) or using inappropriate language to vilify opponents (incivility) tend to be disliked by voters, and remain thus risky for parties facing off in competitive elections. Backlashes against attackers often cancel out any dent the attacks may leave in the support for the targets. Yet, research on the conditions under which these backlashes are more likely to happen remains fragmentary. In this article, we argue that the nature of the electoral competition – specifically, the presence of viable alternative parties for voters to choose from – matters. Voters could be more likely to withdraw political support from the attacker when such alternatives exist. We test whether the availability and ideological attractiveness of alternatives intervene to explain the backlash effect associated with negativity and incivility, at the election, party, and voter levels. We do so comparatively in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections in 27 EU countries, by linking a cross-sectional post-election survey (N = 18,790) with an expert survey covering the campaigning strategies of 175 parties that participated in the election across the continent. Estimating mixed effects multi-level models, we find support for the moderating effect of alternatives at the voter-level; voters who have at least equally attractive alternatives available to them are less likely to support parties that go negative than voters to whom the attacking party is the most viable option. Alternatives do not seem to play a major role, however, at the party and election levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizens increasingly turn to social media for information, where they often rely on cues to judge the credibility of news messages. In these environments, populist politicians use "fake news" and "anti-elitist" attacks to undermine the credibility of news messages. This article argues that to truly understand the impact of these criticism cues, one must simultaneously consider additional contextual cues as well as individual-level moderators. In a factorial survey, we exposed 715 respondents to tweets by a politician retweeting and discrediting a news message of which topic and source varied. We find that both the fake news cue and the anti-elitist cue have limited across-the-board effects but decrease credibility if the message is incongruent with voters' issue positions. Our results thus offer a more optimistic view on the power of populist media criticism cues and suggest that source and confirmation heuristics are (still) stronger influences on citizens' credibility evaluations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political tolerance—the willingness to extend civil rights to political antagonists—is a key democratic norm. We argue that because voters with populist attitudes have an ambiguous relationship with democracy and keep a narrow definition of the people, they are more likely to be politically intolerant. We study the Netherlands, a less likely case to find political intolerance. Using data from a representative household panel survey (n = 1999), we investigate the extent to which populist attitudes translate into general intolerant attitudes and specific intolerance toward political antagonists. Our analyses show that voters with stronger populist attitudes are less supportive of democratic norms, more intolerant of opposing views online, and of specific political opponents. However, they are not explicitly intolerant by limiting individual civil rights or supporting intolerant measures toward political antagonists. These findings show that even in a system engrained with compromise, populist citizens show signs of political intolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Moral rhetoric is a powerful tool for any politician. Yet knowledge on the actual use of political moral appeals is scarce and mostly limited to two‐party systems. This study is the first to systematically investigate the use of moral appeals in formal and informal political elite communication in the multiparty systems of Austria, Germany, and the Netherlands. This allows us to look beyond the unidimensional left‐right axis, instead investigating the extent to which the economic, the sociocultural, and the populist dimension explain differences in moral language. The Moral Foundations Dictionary is used in automated content analyses to study the presence of (different) moral appeals in party manifestos (n = 171,639) and tweets (n = 1,130,073). The results show that West European political elites use a fair amount of moral appeals in their political communication (41.6% of manifesto statements and 33.3% of tweets). Commonalities in the usage of moral language are larger than differences. Yet found differences are multidimensional. Especially when communication is less scripted, political elites tend to distinguish themselves from opponents in their appeals to different moral foundations. Most importantly, these appeals are congruent with ideological values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the effects of populist messages that (a) stress the centrality of "ordinary" people, (b) shift blame to the "corrupt" elites, or (c) combine people centrality and antielitist cues on 3 dimensions of populist attitudes: anti-elitism, homogeneous people, and popular sovereignty. We conducted an extensive 15-country experiment in which we manipulated populist communication as social identity frames (N  =   7,271). Multilevel analyses demonstrate that messages stressing the centrality of the ordinary people activate all dimensions of populist attitudes. In contrast, anti-elite messages activate anti-elitism attitudes only for those individuals with lower levels of education and extreme positions on the ideological left–right spectrum. Our findings suggest that populist political communication plays a key role in activating populist attitudes across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]