Recent research suggests that emotions are a central motivation for radical right voting. One emotion that has gained particular interest is nostalgia: Radical right politicians use nostalgic rhetoric, and feeling nostalgic is associated with radical right support. However, while nostalgia is widely and frequently experienced, previous work differentiates personal contents of nostalgia (e.g., childhood) from group-based contents (e.g., traditions) and suggests that only the latter is related to the radical right. But why does nostalgia, and specifically its group-based content, matter? In the present paper, I argue that nostalgia evokes implicit comparisons between the past and the present. Using relative deprivation theory, I posit that group-based nostalgia makes people subjectively evaluate society's present as worse than its past. In turn, this temporal group-based relative deprivation is associated with attempts to restore the past through radical right voting. Personal nostalgia, instead, does not evoke equivalent experiences of personal relative deprivation and is, therefore, unrelated to radical right support. In preregistered analyses of representative panel data from the Netherlands, I show that group-based nostalgia is more consistently related to radical right support than personal nostalgia. In subsequent exploratory analyses, I test the relative deprivation argument and find that group-based relative deprivation does indeed mediate the relationship between group-based nostalgia and radical right voting: People who long for the group-based past are more likely to feel dissatisfied with the government and, in turn, consider voting for the radical right. In studying this mechanism, I connect recent work on emotional and relative deprivation explanations to radical right voting.
This paper argues that issue salience divergence – the extent to which parties in a party system diverge in their allocation of salience across issues – is a key characteristic of party system decidability. Elections do not only matter in that politicians and parties with different policy positions may come to power. They can also matter if competing elites emphasize different issues. Using data from the MARPOR project and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, I demonstrate that voters perceive greater differences between parties when parties propose agendas that diverge with respect to issue salience. Furthermore, I demonstrate that perceptions of differences between parties mediate the effect of issue salience divergence on respondents’ satisfaction with democracy and self-reported voter turnout. These findings indicate that salience-based differentiation influences the quality of party systems alongside the traditional party system characteristics with important implications for public opinion and political behavior.
Are personal stories more effective in shaping opinion than experts’ endorsements? This study investigates the persuasiveness of personal stories and expert endorsements in shaping public opinion on education spending and pollution reduction policies. Using a survey experiment in Spain, we found that personal stories consistently increased support for both policies, with a particularly strong effect on citizens with populist attitudes or voters of populist parties. These findings contribute to a better understanding of the success of populist parties and the influence of personal stories on public opinion.
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