One of many meta-goals of populism is incentivizing citizens to use reason, logic, and data-based arguments less when making political decisions and relying more on various cognitive and behavioral heuristics, biases, and affects. Populists with masterly use of political, media, and linguistic mechanisms strive to direct and manipulate the emotional experience of reality the citizens possess. What makes this process easier is the nature of populism, capable of skillfully utilizing the citizens' already existing ideas, values, and beliefs.
In their opportunistic endeavor of acquiring and retaining their power, populists principally use two emotional functions: (1) affiliation function and (2) social distancing function (Fischer & Manstead). When it comes to the affiliation function, emotions help populists connect citizens firstly horizontally with each other (‘’us’’), and secondly with them, the populist leaders. The connection created between the populist leader and citizens, based on an emotional function of connection, uses an entire cocktail of emotions, often with anger as the main ingredient. Anger is an emotion that citizens and populists share towards someone (‘’other’’) against whom they fight together. This leads us to the second emotional function, the social distancing function. Social distancing helps people differentiate themselves from others, which is especially important for differentiating our interests from those of others, thus enabling rivalry and competition. Populists use this function with their voters by utilizing emotional sentiments to stigmatize their opponents (elites, politicians, ethnic or religious groups, etc.) as ‘’others’’. The process of stigmatization of opponents relies on awakening anger among citizens that ‘’someone else’’ is responsible for their bad position in society, and endangering their political, religious, economic, and identity rights. That is why populist movements often harness and amplify feelings of anger, resentment, and frustration toward the picture of the enemy (that already exists within a society) in order to unite supporters under a common cause and mobilize them against projected enemies.
In this paper, I will provide several empirically validated data from experimental psychology studies and connect them to anger’s role in populism. Anger as an emotion has specific characteristics that relate to the cognition and strategy of processing, risk assessment, motivation and level of activation, attention capacity and information pursuit (identification), use of prejudices, etc. In addition, I will present findings related to the utilization of anger in real political processes that feature a populist mindset (Donald Trump and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election; Brexit and the United Kingdom; Podemos in Spain).
