Politicians' high-status signals make less-educated citizens more supportive of aggression against government: A video-vignette survey experiment

Various branches of the literature suggest that exposure to
the high‐status appearances and lifestyles of politicians in
contemporary “diploma democracies” affects the attitudes
and behavior of less‐educated citizens because it confronts
them with their lower status in the political domain.
Informed by this, we theorize that such exposure inspires
docility (a lower subjective social status, weaker feelings of
political entitlement) and revolt (anger, more support for
aggression against government). To investigate this, we
conducted an original, pre‐registered, video‐vignette survey experiment among a representative sample of the
Dutch population. While our findings likely generalize to
other liberal democracies, the Dutch context is suitable to
test our theorizing because low‐status and high‐status
appearances and lifestyles are found across the political
arena, irrespective of politicians' substantive positions or
use of populist rhetoric. Each less‐educated respondent
(n = 1390) was presented with a professionally produced
video of an actor playing the part of a fictitious politician.
This politician signaled either a low or a high status via his
appearance and lifestyle. The potentially confounding factors of his substantive positions and populist rhetoric
were randomized and controlled for. We find that exposure
to the high‐status politician increased less‐educated citizens' support for aggression against the government.
Through exploratory analyses, we assess how the responses of docility and revolt are interrelated, and how
they are shaped by less‐educated citizens' economic status.