Alessandro NaiUniversity of Amsterdam | UVA · Amsterdam School of Communications Research ASCoR
Alessandro Nai
Doctor of Philosophy
About
98
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Introduction
I am an Associate Professor of Political Communication and Journalism at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. My research focuses on political communication, voting behaviour, political psychology, and campaigning effects. I recently published work on the personality of candidates, the drivers of negative campaigning and its effects, the psychological underpinnings of persuasion, populist communication, and comparative electoral behavior
Publications
Publications (98)
Under what conditions do citizens support restrictive and punitive measures to curb global crises? This article investigates the role of political trust in supporting different interventions across three types of crises-pandemics, climate change, and terrorism-both directly and in conjunction with issue-related anxiety. We test the hypothesis that...
Little is known about why candidates decide to make use of emotional messages when campaigning for a political office, and under which conditions this is more likely to happen. We focus on the use of fear and enthusiasm appeals and assume that these are a function of profile of candidates and the nature of the context in which the election takes pl...
We investigate the antecedents of affective polarization in the American public, and focus specifically on the driving role of exposure to darker forms of campaign communication (negativity, incivility, populist rhetoric) and the intervening role of individual populist attitudes. Experimental evidence was gathered among a sample of US respondents (...
Political incivility—that is, treating political opponents with disrespect—and its consequences are increasingly investigated. This article examines the effect of incivility on message persuasiveness and the moderating role of populist attitudes and personality traits. We test these relationships via original experimental data collected in Switzerl...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
The extent in which voters from different ideological viewpoints support state interventions to curb crises remains an outstanding conundrum, marred by conflicting evidence. In this article, we test two possible ways out from such puzzle. The role of ideology to explain support for state interventions, we argue, could be (i) conditional upon the id...
Political leaders across the globe are seemingly getting “darker”—uncivil, controversial, showcasing an aggressive personality and “bad manners” and taking pleasure in breaking political norms. Who are these politicians, and who likes them? Is a dark personality in politicians an electoral asset, or does it create a backlash? And what are the syste...
There is mounting evidence in the United States and worldwide that highlights a widespread and deepening “principled dislike” between partisan groups. Stemming from group identity dynamics, such as “affective polarization,” it is likely to be triggered by exposure to intra-elite conflicts, such as campaign negativity and incivility. However, empiri...
Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, research on attitudes towards the use of torture on suspected terrorists has become common. However, despite acknowledging the identity-rooted relationship between threat and out-group hostility, the possible relationship between identity attachment and attitudes towards torture has been under-explored. Using data...
Despite decades of research on the nature and characteristics of populism, and on how political actors interpret populist attitudes, the study of how the public identify populist politicians remains a largely unexplored topic. Is populism in the eye of the beholder? What causes voters to perceive a political actor as populist? Is there any systemat...
Is there anything like a "persuadable type" when it comes to exposure to dissonant information? Who is more likely to be swayed by information that tries to persuade them? Using data from an online sample of American respondents (N = 1,199), we assess whether personality traits (Big Five, Dark Triad) are associated with different perceptions and ef...
Is there anything like a "persuadable type" when it comes to exposure to dissonant information? Who is more likely to be swayed by information that tries to persuade them? Using data from an online sample of American respondents (N = 1,199), we assess whether personality traits (Big Five, Dark Triad) are associated with different perceptions and ef...
This thematic issue deals with the “negative” side of politics, more specifically with dynamics of political aggressiveness and ideological opposition in voters and elites. Why do candidates “go negative” on their rivals? To what extent are voters entrenched into opposing camps parted by political tribalism? And are these dynamics related to the (d...
We investigate whether entitlement (feeling more deserving than others) and several dimensions of self-conscious affect (broadly reflecting responses to shame and guilt) are associated with voting intentions during the 2020 Presidential election in the USA. We utilized a sample of 443 adults recruited through Prolific. The sample was demographicall...
We test somewhat counter-intuitive the expectation that support for populist radical right (PRR) parties at the national level is associated with public support for ethno-traditional cues—a frequent feature in PRR imagery and nativist discourse—abroad. We do so by leveraging a large-scale comparative dataset that covers voting patterns during the E...
Are Eurosceptic parties more likely to run negative, uncivil and emotional campaigns, as it is often intuitively argued? And with what consequences? In this article, we shed light on the effectiveness of these campaign strategies for Eurosceptic parties during the 2019 European elections. We argue that ‘harsher’ campaigns are ‘in character’ for Eur...
The current study assesses the extent to which government leaders’ personality traits are related to divergent policy responses during the pandemic. To do so, we use data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker initiative (OxCGRT) to measure the speed and magnitude of policy responses across countries and NEGex, a dataset that maps the...
Although individuals have a whole arsenal of resistance strategies they can use to defend their attitude against a persuasion attack, resistance has often been simplified to counterarguing. This article advances previous studies by considering eight distinct resistance strategies and analyzing their isolated and intertwined effect on attitude chang...
This chapter investigates two sets of individual drivers of political participation: cognitive attitudes (knowledge, interest, efficacy) and emotions. Bringing together separate strands of research in cognitive and political psychology literature, the chapter first discusses the importance of cognition and emotion as drivers of participation and vo...
To what extent are negative election campaigns “tailored” to the personality of the candidates? And with what electoral consequences? In this article we tackle these questions by focusing on the 2019 Swiss federal election. We estimate the presence of negativity as a function of the personality profile of competing candidates (Big Five) and the pre...
To what extent are negative election campaigns “tailored” to the personality of the candidates? And with what electoral consequences? In this article we tackle these questions by focusing on the 2019 Swiss federal election. We estimate the presence of negativity as a function of the personality profile of competing candidates (Big Five) and the pre...
Who likes dark politicians? This article investigates whether voters showcasing populist attitudes are more likely to appreciate candidates that score high on dark personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and low on agreeableness. This intuition is tested on a large-scale, assessing how voters perceive the likeability of t...
A growing body of studies shows that the reasons for competing candidates to “go negative” on their opponents during elections—that is, attacking their opponents instead of promoting their own programs or ideas stem from strategic considerations. Yet, existing research has, at this stage, failed to assess whether candidates’ personality traits also...
Negativity in election campaign matters. To what extent can the content of social media posts provide a reliable indicator of candidates' campaign negativity? We introduce and critically assess an automated classification procedure that we trained to annotate more than 16,000 tweets of candidates competing in the 2018 Senate Midterms. The algorithm...
Democrats and Republicans have divergent views about Trump’s personality. Are these perceptions stable over time? We describe the evolution of Trump’s perceived personality (Big Five and Dark Triad) between November 2018 and May 2020 by comparing four samples of American respondents (Mechanical Turk). Trump’s perceived personality is on average ext...
Growth in racial, ethnic, and religious minority populations in western societies has coincided with the growing success of nativist and radical right political parties. A leading target for nativist politicians has been Islamic religious symbols, particularly mosques. But does the presence of mosques within citizens’ milieux influence their politi...
We investigate the contextual conditions under which campaigns in elections worldwide are fought “negatively”, that is, rely on attacks against political opponents. We test the overarching intuition that societal, political, and cultural conflicts in the country are associated with greater negativity in election campaigns; conflicts, we argue, sow...
Research on the effectiveness of negative campaigning offers mixed results. Negative messages can sometimes work to depress candidate evaluations, but they can also backfire against the attacker. In this article, we examine how humor can help mitigate the unintended effects of negative campaigning using data from three experimental studies in the U...
European elections have been described as second-order phenomena for voters, the media, but also parties. Yet, since 2009, there exists evidence that not only voters, but also political parties assign increasing significance to European elections. While initially ‘issue entrepreneurs’ were held responsible for this development, the latest campaigns...
Which candidates are more likely to go negative, and under which conditions? We analyze self-reported survey data from candidates having run in the 2017 German federal election for the main parties. More specifically, we test a comprehensive set of factors supposed to drive the use of (a) negative campaigning in general, (b) policy attacks, and (c)...
The personality traits of political candidates, and the way these are perceived by the public at large, matter for political representation and electoral behavior. Disentangling the effects of partisanship and perceived personality on candidate evaluations is however notoriously a tricky business, as voters tend to evaluate the personality of candi...
The rapidly growing scholarship on the COVID-19 crisis has focused on a variety of macro-level factors to understand government policy responses. The current study addresses an important gap in this line of research by evaluating the extent to which government leaders’ personality traits have led to divergent policy responses during the pandemic. T...
The rapidly growing scholarship on the COVID-19 crisis has focused on a variety of macro-level factors to understand government policy responses. The current study addresses an important gap in this line of research by evaluating the extent to which government leaders’ personality traits have led to divergent policy responses during the pandemic. T...
We investigate whether Schadenfreude – finding pleasure in others’ misfortune – moderates the perception and effects of negative political messages (“negative campaigning”). We present the results of three experiments, two conducted in the United States with samples of 1,722 and 1,408 respondents surveyed via MTurk, and the other conducted in The N...
We test how individual differences moderate the attitudinal effects of attack politics in two online experiments among US respondents, surveyed through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (N=1,408 and N=1,081). Study 1 tests the moderating effect of personality traits (Big Five, Dark Triad) on the effectiveness of character vs. policy attacks. Study 2 investi...
Are candidates with “dark” personality profiles more likely to go negative? We triangulate data for the 2018 Senate Midterms in the United States from two independent sources (the automated coding of social media posts and an expert survey) and test the extent to which the candidates’ “dark” personality traits (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiave...
o ‘go negative’ on their rivals – mainly because of the scarcity of large-scale datasets. In this article, we present new evidence covering over 80 recent national elections across the world (2016–2018), in which more than 400 candidates competed. For the first time in a large-scale comparative setting, we show that, ceteris paribus, negativity is...
Much party communication encourages voters to lower issue-related evaluations of rival parties. Yet, studies of such influence are rare. Drawing on research on political parties’ negative campaigning, this article starts to fill this gap. We triangulate evidence from four survey experiments across six issues in Denmark, the US, and Australia, and s...
We argue that, above and beyond the usual suspects, some campaign strategies are more successful in attracting media coverage. We specifically focus on two elements of campaign content: the tone of the campaign (i.e., whether or not to go “negative” on opponents) and the use of emotional appeals (fear and enthusiasm messages). We argue that both ne...
We usually reject information from sources we dislike. But what if those same sources explicitly disagree with that information? Are we more likely to be persuaded by information that is opposed by someone we dislike? We present results from an experimental study with a convenience sample of 199 Dutch students. Respondents were exposed to counter-a...
The personality of political leaders matters for their electoral success and performance once in office. Yet, we still know too little about the personality profiles of leaders worldwide. In this article, we focus on the profile of a particular type of leader, central to contemporary warnings about ‘democratic backsliding’: strongmen. Who are they?...
The article tests whether the personality of candidates – in terms of their Big Five (extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness) and Dark triad (narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) – is associated with their electoral results. Via a novel dataset based on expert ratings for 122 candidates having co...
Very little is known in broad comparative terms about the nature and content of election campaigns. In this article, we present the first systematic and comparative assessment of the electoral campaigns of candidates having competed in elections across the world along three dimensions: negative campaigning, emotional campaigning and populist rhetor...
Why do parties and candidates decide to go negative? Research usually starts from the assumption that this decision is strategic, and within this framework two elements stand out: the prospect of electoral failure increases the use of negative campaigning, and so does time pressure (little reaming time to convince voters before election day). In th...
Are expert observers and the public at large able to provide an objective assessment of the personality of political figures? We provide special attention to the (curious) personality of Donald Trump and triangulate data from seven sources: two mass surveys with US citizens, three expert surveys (in the USA, Germany, and the Netherlands), and two s...
The ‘populist phenomenon’ has received a lot of attention in recent years. Yet little is known about the populists themselves: who are they? They are often described as bad-mannered provocateurs disrupting the political game, but also as charismatic leaders able to persuade and motivate. Can a populist ‘style’ or ‘personality’ be identified? This a...
Monitoring and holding the powerful accountable, as independent “watchdogs,” news media detect abuses and malpractices and bring them to light with the goal to strengthen democratic governance. Even if the role of journalists as detached watchdogs seems to be dominating in most Western countries, in many developing and authoritarian contexts the pr...
A common narrative portrays Donald Trump as impetuous and quick to anger, thin skinned, constantly lying, brazen, vulgar, and boasting a grandiose sense of self and his accomplishments. Little systematic evidence exists that this is the case, however. With a novel data set based on expert ratings, we (1) provide systematic empirical evidence about...
Little comparative evidence exists about what causes candidates to use negative campaigning in elections. We introduce an original comparative data set that contains experts’ information about campaigning strategies of 172 candidates competing in 35 national elections worldwide between June 2016 and May 2017. Analyses reveal several trends: incumbe...
Populists are often described as using a more aggressive, offensive, and anxiety-fuelled rhetoric than non-populists. Yet, little systematic evidence exists that this is the case. This article presents the first large-scale systematic study comparing the communication style of populists and non-populists worldwide, and introduces an original datase...
Scholars pay increasing attention to the personality of candidates. However, systematic and comparative data across different countries and electoral systems are virtually inexistent. I introduce here a new dataset with information about the personality of 124 candidates having competed 57 elections worldwide. I describe the candidates’ personality...
Doubts about electoral integrity, whether true or false, can undermine faith in the legitimacy of the democratic process. We investigate the reasons for such doubts in the case of the 2016 Federal elections in Australia. A three-wave panel survey of the electorate established that one third of Australians believed (falsely) that the outcome was fra...
We test how party evaluations and perceptions of negativity are affected by sequences of positive/negative persuasive messages. In an experimental survey collected in Denmark, respondents were exposed to either a positive or a negative message on three issues in a random order; this creates a setting where we can test for the effects of eight diffe...
75 national and international experts in US politics evaluated the personality reputation of Trump and Clinton. They evaluated Clinton as average on extraversion, agreeableness, openness, narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, but high on conscientiousness and emotional stability. Trump was rated very low on agreeableness, conscientiousness...
Ethnic diversity has been shown to play a significant role in public goods provision, economic growth and government quality, to mention a few. However, we do not know which is the impact of ethnic diversity on turnout. In this article, we determine which dimensions of ethnic diversity affects turnout. To do so, we have gathered data from over 650...
Recent years have seen resurgent interest in the potential capacity of transparency—the public availability of information—to improve democratic governance. Timely, accurate, granular, and freely available information is generally regarded as intrinsically valuable, as well as having many instrumental benefits. In development, transparency and acco...
This chapter analyzes the quality of election coverage by the traditional news media. It describes a hierarchical model of influences that is expected to shape the fairness of election coverage. These operate at three levels: the political and social structure, the media market, and the journalistic culture. The chapter shows that the fairness of e...
The Electoral Integrity Project's "Year in Elections Report 2015" report covers 180 national parliamentary and presidential contests held from mid-2012 to end-2015 in 139 countries worldwide, including 54 national elections during 2015.
Elections around the world are often manipulated through vote rigging and corruption, intimidation, and violenc...
Our contribution deals with the emotional and cognitive foundations of resistance to persuasive information. We rely on an original quasi-experimental protocol that simulates the flow of information and the respondents' reactions to persuasive arguments on global climate change. Respondents in a representative sample (N = 604) were asked if they su...
While negative campaigning has received increased attention, scholars have mostly focused on its effects. Studies looking at the determinants of negative campaigning remain sparse. Our article contributes to literature by developing a two-level model that takes into account the strategic choices of political actors and their characteristics as well...
Objectives
This article assesses the conditions under which voters are more likely to vote “correctly” in direct democratic ballots. We look for determinants of correct voting simultaneously at the individual and contextual levels through a multilevel approach. At the individual level we provide special attention to the level of sophistication and...
As a result of the initiative against mass immigration (MEI) Switzerland faces a dilemma between control of immigration and the continuation of bilateral agreements. This contribution raises two questions: First, have Swiss citizens' perceptions regarding the incompatibility between immigration control and bilateral agreements evolved since the vot...
This study investigates the conditions under which Swiss citizens take consistent decisions, that is, decisions that reflect their argument-based opinions, during direct-democratic ballots. In line with recent work on cognitive political behavior, we expect the drivers of consistent voting to be found at the individual and contextual level. At the...
We examine the conditions leading social movement organizations to adopt consensus in their internal decision making. To do so, we look at organizations of the Swiss global justice movement, which puts the search for consensus at center stage. Our findings show that the ways in which social movement organizations take decisions and their vision of...
Using individual data on Swiss federal ballots (VOX data) and an original dataset on the evolution and content of political campaigns, this article elucidates how negative campaigning influences individual turnout during Swiss federal ballots. It hypothesises that the effect of negativism on turnout depends on ‘which camp goes dirty’ and, specifica...
Theories of social movements have traditionally focused on movement emergence and the origin of protest activities. Similarly, comparative analyses have focused on explaining crossnational differences in the movements’ mobilization and action repertoires (e.g. Rucht 1994; Kriesi et al. 1995), and sometimes in their outcomes (e.g. Giugni 2004). Such...
The main argument of this chapter is that the political participation of migrants as well as their protest need to be studied by putting more emphasis on the characteristics of the political context within which they settle. We argue that this political context is made of a number of strands that cut across the national and local levels referring t...
L'existence “d'intérêts spécifiques” qu'on pourrait naturellement attribuer à la catégorie des femmes est amplement débattue dans la littérature contemporaine. Ainsi, selon certains, les femmes en tant que catégorie sociodémographique seraient traditionnellement plus portées à s'intéresser à certains sujets (l'enfance, la parité entre les sexes, l'...
The quality of a political system, and especially of a direct-democratic one, lies in the quality of the decisions citizens take. As some authors argue, this can be measured through the overall presence of "correct voting", namely the fact that even uninformed citizens can mimic the choice of political experts (Lupia 1994; Lau and Redlawsk 1997; 20...
Decision making in social movements, and democratic visions and practices more generally, vary strongly from one movement organization to another. This chapter looks at possible explanations of such differences in internal decision making observed among organizations of the Global Justice Movement. Indeed, the adoption of a given democratic model v...