ABSTRACT
Previous work on support for populist parties and populist discourse has often underestimated the role of emotional factors and focused on socio-demographic characteristics. The affective dimension has been studied in the past only in a disguised or implicit way. For the most part, more attention was given to discursive articulations and organizational aspects. Often, emotions and feelings in its analysis are used in a metonymic way; i.e. the analysis of each particular populism is carried out through the use of general affective categories and not through the interpretation of concrete feelings or sentiments. The latter are only recently taken into account in the analysis of far right-wing parties, Latin American populisms, and anti-populist discourses. Prompted by a weak constructionist approach in the newly emerging sub-field of the political sociology of emotions, this chapter delves into the specificities of the emotional underpinnings of populist politics. Among others, it focuses on anger, nostalgia, resentment and ressentiment and keeps a distance from the mainstream ideational approach by defining populism as a schema consisted in two principal slots through which individuals orient themselves towards the political field: the ‘people’, and the division of society between two main power blocs.
