Turning up and down the partisan heat. Voters’ psychological profile and changes in negative radical partisanship over the course of an election

Abstract

Who is more likely to get “heated up” against their political rivals during the course of the campaign, as election day draws near? And for whom is such aggressive stance more likely to “cool down” in the aftermath of the election? Leveraging novel evidence from a four-wave longitudinal survey fielded in the weeks leading to – and the aftermath of – the Dutch national elections of November 2023 (N = 5500 in wave 1, N = 1770 in wave 4), we test for the predictors of changes in negative radical partisanship (NRP) in voters. We measure NRP via four independent indicators – support for political violence, partisan Schadenfreude, moral disengagement, and social distance – and investigate the extent to which the psychological profile of respondents affects whether they “heat up” and “cool down” their radical stance during the course of the election. Results suggest that expressive partisanship and need for chaos highly relate to upsurges of negative radical partisanship in the build-up to elections, while at the same time hampering any post-election cooling down. The dark personality profile of respondents and populist attitudes seem to relate only marginally to (de)radicalization. Data and codes are openly available for replication.