Socio-Economic or Emotional Predictors of Populist Attitudes across Europe

Abstract

Previous research on predictors of populism has predominantly focused on socio-economic (e.g., education, employment, social status), and socio-cultural factors (e.g., social identity and social status). However, during the last years, the role of negative emotions has become increasingly prominent in the study of populism. We conducted a cross-national survey in 15 European countries (N=8059), measuring emotions towards the government and the elites, perceptions of threats about the future, and socio-economic factors as predictors of populist attitudes (the latter operationalized via three existing scales, anti-elitism, Manichaean outlook, people-centrism, and a newly developed scale on nativism). We tested the role of emotional factors in a deductive research design based on a structural model. Our results show that negative emotions (anger, contempt and anxiety) are better predictors of populist attitudes than mere socio-economic and socio-cultural factors. An inductive machine learning algorithm, Random Forest (RF), reaffirmed the importance of emotions across our survey dataset.