“The system is rigged”: How populist moralization elicits emotions

Emotions play a central role in populist politics. Angry voters are more likely to support populist politicians and populist politicians are more likely to use negative emotional appeals than mainstream politicians. Populist political communication scholars have argued that the link between populism and emotions lies in characteristics of the populist message, such as the presence of pro-people utterances, anti-elitism, the exclusion of out-groups, and blame attribution. One aspect in the populist message that is known to be emotionally enticing – the moral nature of the message – has however not been investigated. This is surprising, because morality is at the core of the populist message. Populists are not only negative about elites and positive about the people, but argue that the elite are bad, immoral and corrupt, while the people are of good moral character. The elite are not simply responsible for the people’s problems but inflict harm on the victimized people. This moral distinction between the people and the elite (and other outgroups) is reflected in the use of moral language, that is, the usage of words that reflect widely supported moral values. Since these moral values serve as so-called moral intuitions that guide individual behavior in an unconscious way, they are likely to function as emotional cues. In addition, there is an overlap in words that one would denote as moral and words that are considered eliciting emotions. In this study we depart from the assumption that it is the moral language used by populists that elicits emotions among voters. We test this assumption, focusing in particular on anger and related dimensions of emotion appraisal, in three experiments fielded in the Summer-Fall 2022 in the U.S (n1 = 1320; n3 = 1383; n4 = 869 – after data cleaning). In a 1x3 between-subjects design we expose respondents to either a negative political prompt (control condition), a populist prompt without moral language, and a populist prompt including moral language. After the prompt respondents are asked to reflect about the message they just read. In all three studies we code the open answers for emotional appraisals, while in study 3 we included self-reported measures of emotions as a benchmark. The findings will be discussed in light of existing research on populist communication, moral psychology and emotions.