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Worries about polarization are on the rise. In today's Europe, one of the most manifest gaps is the education divide over immigration. Where lower educated citizens tend to be negative about immigration, higher educated individuals are generally positive. Yet the magnitude of this education divide strongly differs between countries. What explains these differences? I theorize that when the levels of socioeconomic security are high, in particular less well educated citizens will be more likely to focus on issues with a strong cultural component, like immigration, and therefore hold more radical opinions. As a result, existing divides will be more pronounced. Analyzing 23 countries between 2002 and 2018, I show that social welfare spending fuels the education divide over immigration. I demonstrate that, indeed, it does so by affecting the immigration attitudes of the less well educated—not those of the better educated.

In the present experiment, I will investigate the impact of s neutral (non-populist) subjective status threat (compared to no threat) on populist radical right (PRR) support. The main objective of this study is to test the Radical Activation Hypothesis, namely to test if the effect of a status threat on PRR support is larger for individuals scoring high on trait narcissism. To test my hypotheses, I will use a single-factor, post-test only between-subject design with random assignment to either a high or low social status condition. In both conditions, subjective social status will be manipulated with a modified version of a previously used ladder metaphor. Beyond testing the main hypotheses, in the study I will explore the role of eight discrete emotions as well as the way individuals experience misrecognition (subjective status threat) in different life domains (e.g., education, residential area, values) depending on their demographic background.

Pre-Analysis Plan studying the effects of knowledge and confidence in knowledge on emotional responses to politics.

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.

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.

We analyze data from 5 different experimental designs, 7 different data collection sites, 98 different treatments, 585 individuals, a total of 540,883 seconds of facial electromyography (fEMG) recordings and half a million of .1 seconds of skin conductance recordings.

We analyze affective responses to populist rhetoric. We do this by contrasting antiestablishment rhetoric with proestablishment rhetoric. We also investigate whether particular aspects of both types of rhetoric evoke stronger affective responses. And whether particular respondent characteristics explain variation in responses.

In western democracies political polarization is on the rise. As a result, many are worried that the social fabric of our societies and the foundations of liberal democracy are under threat. How can we deal with this challenge? Several politicians, writers and academics have argued that we need more empathy in our public debate. Yet can empathy indeed diminish prejudice and intergroup animosity? Others have suggested that it might be better to not zoom in on, and create concern with, specific individuals and groups. Instead, it might be better but to zoom out and to take a more distant less ‘emotional’ and more ‘rational’ perspective. This leads to an important question: could it be the case that a detached perspective emphasizing the importance of tolerance and social and political pluralism is a better way to foster inclusion and citizenship and to reduce animosity? We propose a unique experiment to study this question. In collaboration with musical theatre company Via Berlin we design a `theatre experiment’ at the June 2022 edition of the Oerol festival -- a large landscape arts festival (about 50.000 visitors) for which the Dutch Island of Terschelling is transformed into a natural artistic stage for theatre, dance, art installations and music. By teaming up with directors, writers, actors, musicians and sound-directors we melt science and arts into one another, and are able to really immerse participants in our experimental conditions. The theatre experiment consists of three parts. In the first part, participants are randomly distributed over four different routes through the woods along which they are exposed to different radio transmissions (the experimental manipulations) -- transmitted by means of speakers hidden in the bushes. They answer questions at two different stops (a tent, stop 1). The second part of the theatre experiment consists of a musical theatre performance at a stage in the dunes, that builds on the themes participants have been exposed to along the routes. The third part of the theatre experiment is a conversation between actors and researchers in which general topics and the performance will be discussed.

sj-docx-1-pol-10.1177_02633957211017763 for Ideologically consistent, but for whom? An empirical assessment of the populism-elitism-pluralism set of attitudes and the moderating role of political sophistication by Bram Spruyt, Matthijs Rooduijn and Andrej Zaslove in Politics

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

Many European countries have seen a growth of populism in recent years. Extant research shows that populist parties are increasingly successful, and that populist messages appear more frequently in the media. This raises the question to what extent populist messages affect public opinion. The aim of this study is to assess whether populist messages fuel political cynicism by arguing that an arrogant, selfish and complacent political elite does not listen to what ordinary people find important. Moreover, it assesses whether populist messages affect only those already favourably predisposed towards populist parties, or whether it affects citizens across the board. The results of a survey experiment, conducted in the Netherlands, suggests that individuals who are exposed to populist messages are indeed more cynical afterwards than individuals who are exposed to a very similar, but more ‘neutrally formulated’ message. However, the effects seem to be restricted to supporters of populist parties.

Support for radical parties on both the left and right is on the rise, fueling intuition that both radicalisms have similar underpinnings. Indeed, existing studies show that radical left and right voters have overlapping positions and preferences. In this article, however, we focus on the differences in the voting bases of such parties. We show that radical left and right voters have sharply diverging ideological profiles. When it comes to the historical traditions of the ‘left’ and ‘right’, these voters differ radically from each other. Both groups express the traditions associated with their mainstream counterparts—particularly with respect to (non-)egalitarian, (non-)altruistic, and (anti-)cosmopolitan values. Such differences also explain why radical left voters tend to be more, not less, educated than mainstream or radical right voters.

This paper explores how support for radical right populist parties may be shaped by new measures of deprivation and inequality based on growth-incidence-curves, gauging growth in real household income across a country's income deciles and calculating a given decile's gains relative to the gains of other deciles. The paper argues that such positional measures capture drivers of economic resentment relevant to radical-right populism. First, radical right populism is more likely among individuals facing more "positional deprivation", those in deciles with gains that are smaller than the gains of the average, richest or poorest deciles in their own country. Second, subjective low income more strongly spurs support for radical right populist parties in polities with higher "positional inequality", where the wealthiest deciles experience greater gains than (or suffer less than) the median or poorest earners. The paper tests these expectations using individual-level survey data from sixteen European countries. It finds support for the arguments, not only in patterns of support and voting for parties in the radical right party family but also in patterns of support and voting for parties expressing more anti-globalization nationalism and authoritarianism in their party manifestos.