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"The Psychology of Attack Politics explores the use of political attacks in election campaigns, and the way in which their, often deliberate, use impacts voters, and has wide reaching societal consequences. With most elections being fraught with tension, disrespectful treatment of political opponents, and political incivility, this timely book aims to disentangle the dynamics of how attack politics is perceived (e.g., whether citizens perceive a negative message to be, indeed, negative) and evaluated (that is, whether citizens like or dislike attack politics). The book looks also at the effects of attack politics, for instance, whether exposure to negative or uncivil messages alters attitudes and behaviours such as turnout, affective polarization, and support for political violence. The authors provide a systematic conceptualization of attack politics, made up of negativity, incivility, intolerance. Focusing on cutting-edge research in political psychology, political communication and electoral behaviour, the authors make the central argument that to understand the effects of different forms of attack politics, there should be a strong focus on individual differences in message perception and evaluation. Exploring what ultimately drives the effects of negative, uncivil, and intolerant rhetoric, and analysing phenomena at the centre of current scientific and public discourse, this is a fascinating reading for academics and students in psychology, political science, sociology, and communication, as well as anyone interested in political campaigning and elections"-- Provided by publisher.
Table des matières
Preface and acknowledgements
List of tables and figures
The authors
Chapter 1. Introduction1.1. Attack Politics is a Shady Business
1.1.1. Defining Attack Politics1.1.2. All the Shades of Attack Politics: Negativity, Incivility, and Intolerance1.1.3. Navigating the Spectrum of Attack Politics 1.2. A Constructivist Approach to Attack Politics
1.2.1. What is Constructivism?1.2.2. Studying Attack Politics from a Constructivist Perspective1.2.3. The Logic of Attack Politics: Perceptions, Evaluations, and their Effects1.2.4. Message-, Person-, and Context-level Influences1.3. The Structure of this Book
Chapter 2. Perceptions: Attack politics in the eye of the beholder2.1. Seeing attack politics for what it is
2.2. Experimental evidence of message perceptions and their drivers
2.2.1. A multi-country experiment2.2.2. Perceptions of negativity, incivility, and intolerance2.3. Candidate and message effects: an exploration via a conjoint experiment
2.3.1. A conjoint experiment2.3.2. Message effects2.3.3. Perceptual influences of partisanship and gender2.3.4 Personality and message characteristics2.4. Concluding remarks
Chapter 3. Evaluations: Attack politics is a matter of taste3.1. Evaluating political attacks: Commonality, moral legitimacy, and entertainment value
3.1.1. Political attacks as common3.1.2. Political attacks as morally legitimate3.1.3. Political attacks as entertaining3.2. Message evaluations and their drivers: evidence from a multi-country experiment
3.2.1. Evaluations of negativity, incivility, intolerance3.2.2. Perceptions and evaluations3.2.3. Profile differences3.2.4. Country differences3.3. The role of message context: evidence from a conjoint experiment in the USA
3.2.1. Main effects of the message3.2.2. Social acceptance and social control - legitimate when others support it?3.2.3. The Dark Triad and negativity, incivility, and intolerance3.4. Concluding remarks
Chapter 4. Candidate likeability and backlash4.1. Winning that damn' election
4.1.1. A large-scale dataset to measure negativity and incivility in elections worldwide4.1.2. Negativity and incivility worldwide4.1.3. Winning an election by going negative and uncivil?4.2. Candidate likeability
4.2.1. Candidate likeability and ideology4.2.2. Candidate likeability and populist attitudes4.3. Experimental evidence
4.3.1. Direct effects4.3.2. The mediating role of perceptions and evaluations4.4. Concluding remarks
Chapter 5. Demobilization and radicalization5.1. A (de)mobilizing effect?
5.1.1. Attack politics and interest in the election5.1.2. Attack politics and turnout 5.2. Attack politics and political violence
5.2.1. Negative attitudes towards the outgroup5.2.2. Supporting political violence 5.3. Beyond politics
5.4. Concluding remarks
Chapter 6. Conclusion6.1. Main findings at a glance
6.1.2. Not all attacks are alike 6.1.2. We are not all equal before attack politics6.1.3. Context matters6.1.4. Perceptions and evaluations drive (some of) the effects of attack politics6.2. What does this all mean?
6.2.1. For academics6.2.2. For practitionersReferences
Appendices:
Appendix A. Additional materials for Chapter 2
Appendix B. Additional materials for Chapter 3
Appendix C. Additional materials for Chapter 4
Appendix D. Additional materials for Chapter 5
A propos de l'auteur
Alessandro Nai is Associate Professor of Political Communication at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His work deals with the dark side of politics, radical partisanship, and political violence.
Lukas P. Otto is a senior researcher and head of the team Designed Digital Data at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Science, Computational Social Science department, Cologne, Germany. His work focuses on effects of political communication, political trust and cynicism, as well as (mobile and computational) methods in the social sciences.
Chiara Vargiu is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on the perceptions of elite incivility and their effects.
