Angry Politics: Populism and the Erosion of Political Supportduring Hard Times

We argue that threat-induced anger is not a universal driver of populist attitudes and waning political support. Instead, we hypothesize that anger erodes democracy-relevant political attitudes only when a threat affects citizens’ norms and only when blame for said threat is attributed to the domestic political system. We corroborate our hypotheses using data from a unique survey experiment conducted in Germany in2022, in which we vary the level of responsibility attribution and threat noxiousnessby exposing respondents to different threats that were salient during the field phase. The results indicate that citizens differentiate whom they hold accountable, such that it is not necessarily the quality of the threat but the quality of the political response to the threat that determines the future of democracy.