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Copyright

Luca Bettarelli, Caroline Close, Laura Jacobs, Emilie van Haute

Published On

2024-09-06

Page Range

pp. 91–114

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

4. Emotive participants?

Emotions, apathy, and protest participation

Chapter of: Bitter-Sweet Democracy?: Analyzing citizens' resentment towards politics in Belgium(pp. 91–114)
Using the RepResent Voter Panel Survey conducted around the 2019 elections in Belgium, this chapter investigates the affective complexity of resentment and its impact on protest participation, understood as non-electoral protest participation and protest voting. We focus on the combination of two core emotions towards politics and their intensities: anger and hope. We highlight five groups that vary in their intensity of anger and hope: neutral, high-intensity hopeful, high-intensity angry, high-intensity emotive, and apathetic. We then connect these five groups to protest behaviours. Our results indicate that different emotional clusters guide distinct types of protest actions. Apathy leads to electoral exit and decreases the probability of protest participation and protest voting. High intensities of anger turns citizens away from mainstream parties and increases their propensity to vote for protest parties. The combination of high intensities of anger and hope motivates the expression of resentment through non-electoral protest actions. Our findings reaffirm the significance of the affective dimension of political action. They support a conception of affective arrangements in which emotions combine to produce political outcomes. Finally, they nuance the idea that there would be absolute positive vs. negative emotions.

Contributors

Luca Bettarelli

(author)
Research Fellow at University of Palermo
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2525-2453

Luca Bettarelli was a research fellow at the Centre d’Étude de la Vie Politique (CEVIPOL) in the framework of the Marie-Curie program at ULB. Since 2023 he has been a research fellow at the University of Palermo. His current research focuses on trends and drivers of political polarization, using a regional approach. He is Editorial Manager of the Italian Journal of Regional Science. His recent work has appeared in Research Policy.

Caroline Close

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5366-5124

Caroline Close is professor in the Department of Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and she is a researcher at the Centre d’Étude de la Vie Politique (CEVIPOL). Her research interests include party politics, political behaviour, representation, and democratic innovations. Her work has appeared in Party Politics, Acta Politica, Parliamentary Affairs, Political Studies, and Representation.

Laura Jacobs

(author)
Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Antwerp
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5094-3531

Laura Jacobs obtained her PhD at the University KU Leuven in 2017. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp and scientific collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her research interests include voting behaviour, political communication, populism, public opinion, and media effects. She has published numerous SSCI-ranked journal articles in high-quality journals in the field of political science and political communication.

Emilie van Haute

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4659-5711

Emilie van Haute is a professor of Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and a researcher at the Centre d’Étude de la Vie Politique (CEVIPOL). Her research interests focus on party membership, intra-party dynamics, elections, and voting behaviour. Her research has appeared in the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, Party Politics, Electoral Studies, Political Studies, and European Political Science. She is co-editor of Acta Politica.