Emotive participants? Emotions, apathy, and protest participation

Abstract

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 non-electoral 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.