Angry populists or concerned citizens? How linguistic emotion ascriptions shape affective, cognitive, and behavioural responses to political outgroups

ABSTRACT

Emotion expressions of outgroup members inform judgements and prompt affective responses in observers, shaping intergroup relations. However, in the context of political group conflicts, emotions are not always directly observed in face-to-face interactions. Instead, they are frequently linguistically ascribed to particular actors or groups. Examples of such emotion ascriptions are found, among others, in media reports and political campaign messaging. For instance, anger and fear are frequently evoked in connection with and ascribed to right-wing populist groups. Yet not much is known about the specific effects that ascriptions of discrete emotions to outgroups can have on intergroup relations. With this pre-registered study, we contribute to bridging this gap by analysing the effects of ascriptions of anger and fear to a right-wing populist outgroup. In an online survey experiment, administered to a sample of the German general population (N = 3500), we manipulated the emotions ascribed to these outgroups using brief vignettes. Our findings suggest that ascriptions of anger to right-wing populist outgroups increase reactive anger in observers, whereas ascriptions of fear reduce anger as well as contempt towards populists. Effects of ascribed emotions on stereotype content and action tendencies could not be identified.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergroup emotion
• emotion ascription
• political psychology
• stereotype content
• right-wing populism

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the OSF repository at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/U2XZR (Pilot Data) and https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/P6CFM (Main Dataset).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 We use the term recipients to denote those members of audiences or publics to whom an emotion ascription that is made to a third party is communicated.

2 See section “Power Analyses” of the data analysis plan in the supplemental material for details on the sample size determination.

3 The quota targets for age and gender were derived from the most recent Eurostat data at the time of data collection (European Commission, 2021). The quota target for school education was derived from the weighted ESS 2018 (European Social Survey ERIC, 2019).

4 The somewhat problematic sample restriction to binary gender categories is a limitation introduced by the survey provider.

5 This is a common measurement procedure applied, for example, by Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim (2019), and several commercial polling institutes like Infratest dimap (2021).

6 The survey questionnaire as reported in the supplemental material contains some additional questions that are not used in the present study but are included to provide a complete picture of the instrument.

Additional information

Funding

This research was co-funded by a grant from the Research Pool of the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.