Reactionary Politics Beyond Anger and Fear: The Complex Emotionality of Illegal and Violent Political Actions

In this paper we investigate the role of emotionality as motivator of reactionary political behavior. The implicit and explicit support of illegal and often violent political actions combined with the desire for change backwards towards the old, is often mistaken for radicalism but instead marks the wave of reactionary politics sweeping across Europe and the world. Expressed as anti-immigration demands, anti-establishment sentiment, anti-expert skepticism and support for far-right parties, this combustive mix of preferences rests on complex emotional dynamics that challenge our theoretical and empirical models in political psychology. In this paper, we examine the emotional drivers of engaging or abstaining from such political behaviors focusing particularly on their interactions with political efficacy as facilitators for reactionary political mobilization. We use data from the World Values Survey with unique emotion measures and identify the affective content of reactionary political engagement. Our findings extend theoretical and empirical work in the field and shed light on the black box of the drivers of political reactionism.