Revisiting the Past with a Partisan Lens: An Experimental Study of Partisanship and Authoritarian Nostalgia
Nostalgic rhetoric has proved effective at recent elections, with authoritarian successor parties and radical-right parties adopting a former dictatorship and a nationalist past as the main campaign narratives. Studies have focused on the mobilizing effect of nostalgia and voter support for politicians invoking the past, but few have tackled the causal relationship between partisanship and nostalgia and examined the possibility of partisan motivated nostalgia and its manipulation by politicians. We use a parallel survey experiment design in South Korea and employ a mediation analysis in order to test the directional relationship between partisanship and the nostalgic sentiment. We find greater support for partisan mobilization of nostalgic sentiment but limited evidence for the effects of nostalgia on partisanship. Partisan mobilization increases nostalgic sentiment, but employing nostalgic rhetoric by a non-partisan actor has limited effects on partisanship. Results from this study contribute to our understanding of the rise in nostalgic rhetoric and popular support for authoritarian alternatives in the recent wave of autocratization.