The affective style of politics: Evidence from cross‐country surveys

Abstract We know that emotions matter in politics but less is known about the role of individual ways of processing and responding to emotions, that is, affective styles. Here we report on two surveys, exploring the relationship between affective style (i.e., the individual propensity to either tolerate, adjust, or conceal emotions) and social and political trust. We base our study on large‐n representative survey data from Denmark ( N = 1048) and the United States ( N = 1046), including the Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ) battery of questions. We observe strong cross‐country similarities that adjusting positively correlates with trust, while concealing negatively correlates with trust. We furthermore show that affective style contributes novel explanatory power beyond personality traits. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the role of emotions in politics, providing salient insights into individual ways of processing and responding to emotions and how that impacts politically salient outcome variables like trust.