Matthijs Rooduijn’s research while affiliated with University of Amsterdam and other places

Emotions, such as anger and anxiety, play a central role in political behavior and are extensively studied by political scientists. However, political science has largely adopted psychological theories of emotions without empirically testing their core assumptions in political contexts.In this paper, we focus on cognitive appraisal theory and test whether political emotions follow distinct appraisal patterns, and whether the underlying theoretical models accurately explain how discrete emotions emerge in political contexts. We conducted two surveys in the U.S. in 2022 and 2023. Participants recalled emotional experiences from either the personal or political domain, labeled their emotions, and rated the event along 18 cognitive appraisal dimensions. We then trained several models to predict the emotion label based on the reported appraisals.In non-political contexts, we can predict emotions based on the reported appraisals with high accuracy and discrete emotions align with theoretical appraisal patterns. However, in political contexts, negative emotions (anger, anxiety, despair) have overlapping appraisal profiles, and models perform consistently worse when trying to predict these emotions.These findings challenge the assumption that emotions function similarly in political and personal domains and suggest that existing appraisal-based models do not sufficiently capture political emotions. Our results highlight the need for revised theoretical frameworks that account for contextual differences in emotional processes within political science.

The rise of illiberalism has become a global concern, especially since the establishment of far‐right illiberal regimes in countries such as Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey. When in power, far‐right parties tend to promote democratic backsliding, leading to a proliferation of studies of the illiberal regimes established by the far‐right. Less attention has been paid so far to the embrace of illiberal ideas by these parties. Although studies of these parties’ populism, nativism, and authoritarianism are ubiquitous, we know little about the way in which these three ideological pillars become integrated into an overarching illiberal agenda. This article aims to analyze the extent to which European far‐right parties embrace illiberal ideas, irrespective of whether they are in power. To pursue this objective, we focus on parliamentary speeches given by far‐right parties in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2019. Methodologically, we employ a dictionary‐based content analysis to identify which speeches by far‐right members of the European Parliament contain illiberal ideas. Subsequently, we measure the percentage of far‐right illiberal speeches per year. Our study shows that although illiberalism has always been a relevant feature of the far‐right, illiberal ideas have become more prominent in speeches of far‐right members of the European Parliament since 2017, after Brexit and the election of Trump.

The Oxford Handbook of Dutch Politics presents a comprehensive longitudinal overview of the Dutch political system. It outlines the Dutch political system’s origins, historical development, key institutions, faults, processes, and key public policy dynamics. Old social cleavages of Dutch politics waned following the influence of long-term demographic, socio-economic, and cultural shifts, while new social identities and dividing lines influenced Dutch citizens’ political attitudes, behaviours, and voting patterns. The changing media landscape and the information environment produced shifts in the party system, coalition formation and management process, and executive–legislature relations. The Handbook offers insights into stability and change in a political system that once gained notoriety as a consensual (or consociational) democracy archetype.

Empathy has been proposed as a solution to alleviate interparty antipathy. Recent findings from the US suggest that one aspect of empathy – empathic concern – increases rather than decreases affective polarization. Perspective-taking, another aspect of empathy, has no effect on affective polarization. In this article, we describe a preregistered replication and extension of these findings in the contrasting political context of the Netherlands, to see whether this relationship generalizes beyond the US. First, using a cross-sectional nationally representative sample of 1,258 Dutch voters, we show that empathic concern indeed fuels affective polarization while at the same time we find that perspective-taking reduces it. Second, using a two-arm survey experiment (n = 438), we show that perspective-taking reduces ingroup bias, whereas empathic concern does not. Reflecting on the American and Dutch findings, we conclude that while empathic concern likely contributes to affective polarization, perspective-taking may reduce it.

Who supports the populist radical right (PRR)? And under what circumstances? We theorize that social status-related envy (SSRE) is the construct that integrates personality- and grievance-based theories of PRR support. To assess our theory, we estimate psychological network models on German survey data to map the complex relationships between PRR support, Big Five personality traits, facets of narcissism, political attitudes, and multiple constructs measuring objective and subjective social status. Our findings confirm previous studies detecting two routes to PRR support: a disagreeable and an authoritarian one. The Bifurcated Model of Status-Deprived Narcissistic Right-Wing Populism claims that SSRE is the distant predictor of PRR support and the two constructs are connected by two pathways. The middle-class route is characterized by disagreeable narcissism (Rivalry) and nativism, while the lower-class route by Neuroticism (potentially Vulnerable Narcissism) and authoritarian right-wing populism. Moreover, we find preliminary support for our expectation that PRR voting is explained by the activation of narcissistic traits by SSRE.

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Opinion formation and information processing are affected by unconscious affective responses to stimuli—particularly in politics. Yet we still know relatively little about such affective responses and how to measure them. In this study, we focus on emotional valence and examine facial electromyography (fEMG) measures. We demonstrate the validity of these measures, discuss ways to make measurement and analysis more robust, and consider validity trade-offs in experimental design. In doing so, we hope to support scholars in designing studies that will advance scholarship on political attitudes and behavior by incorporating unconscious affective responses to political stimuli—responses that have too often been neglected by political scientists.

When do voters switch from mainstream to niche parties and vice‐versa? To understand these switches, we focus on the saturation of the party system. We theorize that when a party system is oversaturated – i.e. when a higher effective number of parties contests elections than predicted based on socio‐political contextual characteristics (the system's ‘carrying capacity’) – it becomes increasingly likely that: (1) mainstream party voters defect to niche parties; and (2) niche party voters refrain from switching to mainstream parties. Based on vote‐switching patterns in 15 countries and 53 elections, we find that oversaturation increases shifts from mainstream to niche parties. Further analyses show that this holds for shifts from mainstream to radical left and right parties, but not for shifts to green parties. This has important consequences for research on vote switching, the electoral consequences of policy differentiation and the competition between niche and mainstream parties.

With a proliferation of scholarly work focusing on populist, far-left, and far-right parties, questions have arisen about the correct ways to ideologically classify such parties. To ensure transparency and uniformity in research, the discipline could benefit from a systematic procedure. In this letter, we discuss how we have employed the method of ‘Expert-informed Qualitative Comparative Classification’ (EiQCC) to construct the newest version of The PopuList (3.0) – a database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties in Europe since 1989. This method takes into account the in-depth knowledge of national party experts while allowing for systematic comparative analysis across cases and over time. We also examine how scholars have made use of the previous versions of the dataset, explain how the new version of The PopuList differs from previous ones, and compare it to other data. We conclude with a discussion of the strengths and limitations of The PopuList dataset.