Do elections affect political anger?
Top image: A seemingly defaced FPO candidate billboard in Innsbruck, Austria. (Photo: Jolly Janner/Wikimedia Commons)
91ý political scientists find that far-right voters in Austria were less angry after electoral success while many mainstream voters correspondingly became more angry
Much of the current research on right-wing populist parties focuses on what motivates their supporters before elections—particularly anger, anxiety and discontent.
But a from University of Colorado BoulderDepartment of Political Science ʰǴڱǰJennifer Fitzgerald and graduate studentsMateusz Leszczynski ԻSinan Nadarevic takes a different approach. Instead of examining what drives voters to support far-right parties—typically hardline attitudes on immigration, strong Euroskepticism and deep distrust of domestic political leaders—the researchers sought to understand what happens to those voters after their party achieves electoral success.
“What we’re doing is turning that question around,” explains Fitzgerald, whose research focuses on comparative political behavior. “Instead of asking what leads someone to support a far-right party, we’re asking what happens afterwards. Once someone has cast that vote, how do they feel?”
91ý political scientists Jennifer Fitzgerald (left), MateuszLeszczynski (center) and SinanNadarevic (right) asked once someone has cast a vote, how do they feel?
The researchers found their answers in studying the 2017 election in Austria, in which the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) finished strongly in third place, allowing it to become a junior partner in a coalition government headed by the center-right Austrian People’s Party (OVP). As the results were counted, FPO voters became less angry and anxious—and more hopeful and confident, the researchers found.
The study’s findings challenge the widely held assumption that populist parties rely on a constant state of anger, says Leszczynski, who studies comparative politics and public policy. Those findings suggest that election outcomes can significantly alter political emotions—at least in the short term, he adds.
Fitzgerald says the research offers a new perspective on how voters experience democratic politics and may help researchers better understand emotional dynamics across modern democracies.
Looking for answers in Austria
One reason the three researchers looked at Austria is because the Freedom Party is one of Western Europe’s longest-running far-right parties and has enjoyed some measure of electoral success, even prior to the 2017 elections, Fitzgerald says.
“(FPO) has a very established electorate and a very well-known brand,” she says.
Austria also had another factor in its favor in terms of studying electoral behavior. Specifically, researchers had access to a rare Austrian survey that tracked political emotions before and after the country’s 2017 national elections. That’s significant because one challenge in studying political emotions is separating them from broader feelings about life, says Nadarevic, who studies comparative politics and American politics.
“It didn’t ask how they felt in general, how they felt about the economy or how they felt about society. It was explicitly focused on the political situation at that moment in time,” he says. He says that distinction helped the researchers isolate political emotions more effectively than many previous studies conducted in other countries with far-right parties.
“We also looked at data from countries such as Britain, Switzerland, the United States and Finland,” he says. “Austria was unique in asking specifically about political emotions rather than simply asking respondents how they were feeling overall.”
Leszczynski says that specificity allowed the researchers “to get much closer to the underlying mechanism.”
At the same time, as with any survey-based study, this research depends on self-reported responses, which always carry built-in limitations, Fitzgerald acknowledges.
A Freedom Party of Austria (FOP) campaign van bearing the image of Herbert Kickl, who has led the party since 2021. The slogan "Dein herz sagt ja" translates to "Your heart says yes." (Photo: Asurnipal/Wikimedia Commons)
“That’s always a challenge with survey data,” she says. “No survey instrument is perfect, and no survey question perfectly captures the phenomenon you’re trying to measure.”
Rather than treating survey responses as definitive proof of emotional states, Fitzgerald says the researchers interpret them in light of existing political psychology research.
“This is where the existing literature becomes so important,” she says. “Prior research gives us a set of theoretical expectations—sometimes competing expectations—which help guide our interpretation of the results.”
Fitzgerald emphasizes that research is an ongoing process of comparing data, theory and previous findings.
“We recognize that surveys don’t provide absolute truth about how people feel,” she says. “However, when interpreted in the context of broader scholarly literature, they can still provide meaningful insights.”
Electoral winners feel better
The study’s central finding is straightforward: Electoral success appears to improve how FPO supporters feel about politics—at least in the short term. Notably, those emotional changes were strongest among voters with deep attachments to the party, Leszczynskisays.
“What we looked at was the strength of an individual’s connection to the party,” he says. The researchers compared highly committed supporters with voters who back the FPO but did not strongly identify with it.
“We found that voters who were more strongly connected to the party—what people might call ‘core’ or ‘hardcore’ supporters—experienced much stronger emotional shifts,” Nadarevic says. That finding resembles patterns seen in many democracies, where strong partisans tend to invest more emotionally in election outcomes than voters who simply choose a party in a particular election, he adds.
Fitzgerald says the results suggest that many far-right voters behave much like traditional party loyalists when it comes to how they feel about their preferred party’s electoral performance.
“Our findings suggest that at least some of these voters behave much like traditional partisans,” she explains. “The strongest emotional shifts occurred among those with the strongest partisan attachment.”
Still, the researchers offer a caveat with their findings: Their research makes no claims that election results permanently reduce anger. Campaign cycles may repeatedly increase and decrease emotions; thus, political emotions may be cyclical rather than fixed.
“We can’t say that reduced anger and reduced anxiety persist long term,” Fitzgerald notes.
Elections create winners and losers
Another key finding of the research report: Elections affect more than just the victorious party’s supporters. In the 2017 Austrian election, while FPO voters experienced an emotional uplift, supporters of the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) reacted in the opposite direction.
An FPO campaign booth in Wein, Austria. 91ý researchers found that in the 2017 Austrian election, while FPO voters experienced an emotional uplift, supporters of the center-left Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) reacted in the opposite direction. (Photo: Janos Korom/Wikimedia Commons)
“What we observed was that center-left voters became more politically angry and anxious after the election,” Leszczynski says. In effect, elections produce emotional winners and losers as well as political ones, he adds.
Fitzgerald says she believes that broader perspective is essential for understanding modern democracy.
“If we looked only at far-right voters, we’d learn something useful from this analysis,” she says. “But by examining other parties as well, we see broader patterns.”
Nadarevic says the result is a kind of emotional trade-off, where gains among one group are accompanied by losses among another.
“To us, that’s a fascinating way to think about elections,” Fitzgerald says. “It highlights just how emotionally consequential modern democratic politics have become.”
Although there are no immediate plans for a follow-up paper, the researchers say a variety of avenues could be pursued, such as designing longitudinal studies in Austria that could better measure emotional changes over time, examining far-right parties and electoral outcomes in other countries, making comparisons across parties and ideologies and putting an even greater focus on the emotional consequences of political participation.
Implications beyond Austria
Although the researchers focused on Austria, they believe its findings could have relevance elsewhere.
Fitzgerald notes that scholars frequently identify similar characteristics among far-right voters in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, France and Sweden.
“We think there’s a reasonable possibility that our findings could generalize beyond Austria,” she says.
At the same time, the researchers are careful not to overstate their conclusions.
“We view this as a case study with broader theoretical relevance—rather than proof that the same pattern exists everywhere,” Fitzgerald says.
Perhaps the most difficult question raised by the study concerns democratic legitimacy. For instance, if electoral success reduces anger and anxiety among populist voters, does that represent a healthy outcome for democracy? The researchers are cautious about drawing simplistic conclusions.
“It’s certainly something worth thinking about,” Fitzgerald says. However, the answer becomes more complicated when considering the emotional reactions of other voters, she acknowledges.
“If anger and anxiety decline among far-right voters while increasing among center-left voters, it’s hard to conclude that there is an overall gain in democratic legitimacy,” she says.
For the researchers, they say the most important lesson may be that emotions deserve a more central place in discussions about voting and democracy.
“What we can say is that public confidence in democratic politics matters greatly,” Fitzgerald says, “and understanding these emotional dynamics helps us ask better questions about democracies and their citizens.”
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