Do Anti-establishment Messages Activate Narcissistic Traits in Populist Voting?

• In Event: Parties, Populism, and Politics

Abstract

Populism research is closely intertwined with the topic of mis- and disinformation. Why is this the case, and what personality traits predispose citizens to be receptive to certain kinds of messages? From the supply side, disinformation and conspiratorial narratives can be fundamental elements of populist propaganda as they help blame political elites for failures, construct ingroup identities (the “real people”), and develop polarizing narratives about outgroups threatening the ingroup's status (Müller, 2022; Pirro & Taggart, 2022). From the demand side, a conspiratorial and a populist mindset are rooted in very similar psychological processes (Van Prooijen, 2018; Silva et al., 2017, Müller, 2016) and both are reliably predicted by dark personality traits like narcissism (Uscinski et al., 2021; Cichocka et al., 2022; Stasielowicz, 2022). Narcissistic individuals, for instance, tend to vote for (right-wing) populist candidates, especially when their (reactionary) values are perceived to be threatened (Mayer et al. 2020; Mayer & Nguyen, 2021), and to share anti-establishment disinformation when they feel hindered in their status pursuit (Arceneaux et al., 2020). These findings are consistent with both the literature linking different types of status loss to anti-establishment sentiments (Gidron & Hall, 2020; 2017; Steiner et al., 2022; de Lange et al., 2022; Harteveld et al., 2022) and with research emphasizing the fundamental role of status seeking and vigilance to status threats in narcissistic behavior (Grapsas et al., 2020).

The present paper investigates the role of populist conspiracism, status threats, and narcissism in populist voting behavior. In doing so, to maximize both internal and external validity, it combines survey data with an experimental design. In the first study, we estimate regularized partial correlation network models (e.g. Epskamp & Fried, 2018) on the German GESIS panel (GESIS, 2017) to map the complex relationship between populist voting, narcissism, political attitudes, demographic variables, and multiple constructs measuring social status. After exploring these data, the formulated hypotheses will be pre-registered for an experiment. In the second study, either participants’ perceived social status will be manipulated by the widely-used ladder metaphor (Kraus et al., 2011) or they will be exposed to populist disinformation about a conspiring elite. As output variables, we measure the propensity to vote for hypothetical and real populist candidates. The goal of the present paper is to explore the extent and type of status threat induced by anti-elitist messages (compared to both a control group and a neutral status-manipulation), their relationship with populist voting behavior, and the conditionality of these effects on narcissistic traits.

Authors

• Daniel Komaromy, University of Amsterdam

• Matthijs Rooduijn, University of Amsterdam