Red alert! The role of threat and intolerance in the climate discourse of radical political actors in Belgium and the Netherlands

Research in political psychology has long shown that people’s authoritarian attitudes get activated under the condition of perceived threat. When individuals feel threatened, heightened levels of ressentiment and a punitive intolerance towards moral, ideological, or cultural deviants are detected. In this paper, I analyse whether radical political actors reflect this threat-intolerance dynamic in the context of climate policy debates. First, I compare how radical right-wing parties, radical left-wing parties, and radical climate movements in Belgium and the Netherlands deal with the threat posed by climate change. I expect that every radical party or movement will identify dangers related to global warming, albeit differently. Extinction Rebellion, a radical climate movement, is expected to identify global warming as something that threatens society’s very survival. In contrast, radical left-wing parties are expected to see socio-economic dangers emerging from both a changing climate and policy decisions to mitigate carbon emissions. On the other hand, I hypothesize that radical right-wing parties focus solely on the threat posed by climate mitigation policies to society’s welfare and way of life, while ignoring or downplaying the danger coming from climate change itself. Second, I assess and compare the reaction of these political groups in response to perceived threats. If radical political actors identify a threat, they are expected to attack those whom they hold accountable for these dangers, such as political elites or ideological opponents. Moreover, considering threats should activate authoritarian attitudes, we expect more appeals to authority when dangers are associated with global warming or climate mitigation policy. By employing a supervised machine learning model on public statements of radical actors in Belgium and the Netherlands, this research clarifies how political actors appeal to the emotions of citizens in an effort to convince them of the need to vote for them (in the case of the parties) or to support their cause (in the case of the radical climate movement). By focusing on how the climate discourse of political actors connects with individual emotions, it bridges a gap between political psychology and political science. Ultimately, the paper aims to improve our understanding of how political actors mobilize individuals by shaping and tagging into the latter’s attitudes.