Abstract
It has often been argued that the communication strategies used by right-wing populists are key to their appeal to voters. However, prior studies found only rather limited across-the-board effects of communication strategies that employ a populist style and rhetoric. In this study, we focus on the conditionality of the effects of these two communication strategies on the perceived legitimacy of one right-wing populist and one mainstream leader. We use an experimental setup with a large-N representative sample of Dutch voters (n=3125). The results show that the effects of populist communication strategies differ for the lower educated and the politically cynical. These groups of voters are more susceptible to persuasion by the populist style of the right-wing populist party leader. Results are discussed in the light of research on (right-wing) populism.
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Notes
The authors would like to thank the MESS (Measurement and Experimentation in the Social Sciences) project for the acceptance of the research proposal, for their valuable comments, and for providing the data.
A previous version of this article can be found in [Bos, 2012]. In this article, an additional dependent variable regarding the perceived effectiveness (that is, the extent to which a politician is perceived to be influential) of the politician is included. It also tests an additional communication strategy, namely, ‘authoritativeness’, which refers to how knowledgeable a politician appears to be about the topics discussed.
Some authors mention a third aspect of the populist rhetoric: exclusionism. This element is not included in this study, because it is not an element of populist rhetoric per se, but it is typical for radical right-wing populists. This conceptualization has also been labelled ‘thick’ populism (Jagers and Walgrave, 2007).
These response rates were computed according to the AAPOR-guidelines (AAPOR RR1).
The data were collected in February 2011.
Dependent upon the condition.
We have also tested whether the experimental groups differ with regard to their support for a new nuclear power station, but the F-test is non-significant (F(73 095)=1.369, P=0.214).
F(3492) varies from 6.057 to 80.786, P=0.000.
That we do not find significant marginal effects of populist style on the perceived legitimacy of Blok for the people that are on the extreme low end of the political cynicism scale is caused by the fact that there are almost no observations on this end of the scale: only 5 per cent of the respondents scores 0–1.5 on the political cynicism scale.
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Bos, L., van der Brug, W. & de Vreese, C. An experimental test of the impact of style and rhetoric on the perception of right-wing populist and mainstream party leaders. Acta Polit 48, 192–208 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.27