When Is Incivility Too Much? Moral Disapproval, Ideological Alignment, and Evaluations of Political Actors

Uncivil political communication can be conceptualized as a marked lack of respect for a political opponent and can include name-calling, aspersions, lying, vulgarity and pejorative speech(Coe et al., 2014). Incivility can be found across the political spectrum, however some research has found it to be more prevalent in right-wing communication (Sobierj & Berry, 2011). Some studies have found that incivility decreases support for political actors (Frimer & Skitka, 2018) however, few studies take in to account the different degrees of incivility. We argue that citizens may be somewhat primed to expect a certain degree of incivility in the current political context and thus they are likely to evaluate actors who use higher degrees of incivility lower than those that display moderate levels of incivility. We further argue that this relationship is influenced by the degree to which citizens morally disapprove of the message. While Frimer and Skitka(2018) find that incivility can decrease political support even amongst their base, Skytte (2022) also find that moderate levels of incivility are often tolerated and only more extreme forms of incivility lead to any kind of backlash effect. We argue that the degree to which citizens align with a party will influence their perceptions of the actors who engage in uncivil political communication. Looking through the lens of motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006; Kahan, 2013) we argue that citizens will employ asymmetrical reasoning patterns in which their strength of identification with the actor who is being uncivil will influence how they evaluate that actor. The study is a 3 (degree of incivility: none, moderate, severe) x 3 (ideology of actor PVV, GL-PvdA, VVD) between subjects design. In this experiment participants were be randomly assigned to one of nine conditions in which they read a short text from a politician using strong uncivil language, moderately uncivil language; or no uncivil language. We varied the party affiliation of the politician to determine if the degree of alignment with the political actor has a moderating effect on the relationship between the degree of incivility and evaluations of the politician. After exposure we asked participants how they feel towards the political party using a feeling thermometer and their moral disapproval with the message. Preliminary results find no significant differences in reported affect between the moderate and severe conditions. This suggests that citizens evaluate political actors similarly, regardless of if they engage in moderate or more severe forms of incivility. We find significant differences regarding the degree to which participants morally disapprove of the message, with participants reporting higher moral disapproval when exposed to more severe forms of incivility, compared to moderate forms of incivility. Further, we investigated the degree to which ideological alignment with the politician moderated these effects. We found that the more ideologically aligned participants were with the politician, moral disapproval with the message decreased. These preliminary results suggest that although citizens morally disapprove of uncivil political communication, they are willing to make an exception for political actors they feel ideologically close to.