More than Mimicry? The Role of Anger in Uncivil Reactions to Elite Political Incivility

Public opinion scholars contend that mass discourse tends to mirror elite discourse owing to the cognitive accessibility of recently encountered messages. I argue that elite incivility can generate anger and that this affective reaction in part drives use of incivility in political expressions. To test this, I conduct an online experiment in which subjects were exposed to statements said to be made by party elites, with the partisan tie and the presence of incivility both manipulated. In both this study and a smaller replication experiment, incivility targeting one’s in-group generated anger but like-minded incivility did not. Moreover, exposure to disagreeable incivility increased incivility use among subjects in open-ended comments, with anger playing a mediating role between reception and uncivil response.