Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Emotions And Opinions: The Causes And Effects Of Contemporary Populism, Hunter Driggers

Masters Theses

Populism has experienced a global resurgence. Yet at the individual level, little empirical research has been conducted to validate theories surrounding this phenomenon, including claims that anger is necessary to trigger populist sentiment and that contemporary populists have a strongly negative perception of society. I conduct a novel survey experiment on US adults (n = 488) that induces anger among various groups and measures populist sentiment as well as opinions on domestic society and the global commons. I perform this examination by first comparing control and treatment groups, ascertaining anger’s impact on populist sentiment while accounting for preexisting anger and …