Measuring and Understanding Frustration and Resentment in Politics: The case of Chile, 2017-2022

Discontent and political attitudes have been relevant objects of study in political science for the last 60 years. Nowadays, however, there is a renewed interest in understanding the phenomena through different approaches and disciplines. The rise of populist and nationalist narratives in consolidated and emerging democracies has justified new studies on individuals and territorial factors that explain the development of attitudes. Some scholars suggest that citizens who live in specific territories—abandoned or left behind places—are more likely to feel frustration and resentment. Thus, these feelings would impact political preferences. However, although there are several contributions, there is no agreement in terms of measuring and estimating frustration and resentment in politics. Following the classic literature about political attitudes (e.g. Campbell et al. 1954; Gamson 1968; Craig 1980), and based on new contributions about the geography of discontent (e.g. Rodríguez-Pose 2018, 2020), our work seeks to offer a methodological proposal to study these specific sentiments, trying to understand some of the elements that explain them. The data used in this work came from six versions of 1650 face-to-face case surveys conducted in the Chilean region of Valparaíso between 2017 and 2022 (n = 9,900 cases). Using Structural Equations Models (SEM) and other techniques for grouping and panel data, we justify the building of two variables to differentiate between the feelings flow—i.e. frustration—and the accumulative sentiment—i.e. resentment—in political disaffection. Thus, our analysis considered two parts. The first part is focused on the methodological proposal to measure frustration and resentment in politics, including a descriptive approach to identify the different trajectories in terms of some sociodemographic variables. The second part is inferential, focusing on understanding factors that should explain political resentment. Our preliminary results suggest that political frustration and resentment vary in gender, age and socioeconomic status. Contrary to an absolute deprivation approach, our data shows that the richest young people accumulate more political resentment than others. Additionally, our panel data analysis suggests that political interest and ideology significantly influence political resentment. By measuring flow and stock attitudinal variables, we seek to identify some elements and factors that influence political disaffection, including its temporal dimension. This proposal would help us to understand some consequences of political resentment and to identify the best alternatives to face them. Considering current challenges, this seems to be an important issue for emerging and consolidated democracies, especially Chile (our Case Study), a Latin American country experiencing one of its biggest democratic crises in recent history, with massive protests and an ongoing constituent process.