Voters generally don’t like when politicians go low, stooping to insults, intimidation, and inflammatory rhetoric against their opponents. So why is this bad behavior still rewarded at the ballot box?
 
In his new book, Nasty Politics: The Logic of Insults, Threats, and Incitement, School of Public Affairs professor Thomas Zeitzoff explores the use of ugly rhetoric for political gain, looking at the recent experience of Israel, the US, and Ukraine. He conducted surveys in all three countries, examining voters’ opinions about different types of rhetoric; polled local political elites to understand their attitudes and motivations; and built a dataset of more than 400 reported incidents of nasty politics in Ukraine and nearly 1,000 in the US.

“I was always interested in why people fight and how people exposed to violence respond,” says Zeitzoff, who teaches in SPA’s Department of Justice, Law, and Criminology. “I would see politicians use nasty rhetoric in other countries, calling their opponents ‘animal,’ ‘scum,’ or ‘terrorist.’ Around 2015, I started seeing it here in the US. I wanted to understand why [politicians] do this. The conventional wisdom is that it’s distasteful, but it works.”

Zeitzoff considers the motivation for nasty politics through the lens of political psychology.

“Humans are really bad at understanding and explaining the motivations for our actions,” he says. “The idea of political psychology is that, like it or not, politics determines our nations, our laws, our legal system, all the way down to the school board. Our motivations, emotions, social group identity, and personalities all influence how we come to politics and how politicians try to woo voters.”

Sometimes politics devolves into a state of so-called affective polarization, in which groups not only disagree over policy, but maintain and express a visceral dislike of the other side. This deep aversion serves as a ready breeding ground for ugly rhetoric.

But are strong partisan allegiances the only driver of nasty politics? Zeitzoff is unconvinced. 

“Ukraine is a country with, historically, a very weak partisan identity,” he says. “If the story of nasty politics is about partisan polarization, you have to explain why the politics in Ukraine [before the Russian invasion in 2022]”––marked by physical fights on the legislature floor––were way nastier than they are in the US.”

The book addresses this question, as well as the ultimate puzzle: Why do politicians use nasty politics if voters don’t like it?

“Nastiness grabs attention,” Zeitzoff says. “Also, during periods of heightened threat or uncertainty, voters may want somebody who’s a little tough. They don’t particularly like this politician and wish they would tone it down, but things are so bad that [they] need somebody tough and willing to fight for [them].”

Ukrainian politician Oleh Lyashko used similar tactics in 2014, when protests across Kyiv known as Euromaidan ousted then Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. This eventually led to armed conflict between Ukraine and pro-Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine. At the start of the conflict, Lyashko formed a militia, recorded himself interrogating detainees, engaged in brawls on the parliament floor, and hurled epithets at his opponents, calling them “animal bastards.”

“Before the Euromaidan protests, people thought of Lyashko as a carnival barker,” Zeitzoff says. “But during Euromaidan, he actually finished third in the presidential election, with 15 percent of the vote. Eventually, people grew tired of his act, and he was voted out in 2019. I think there was a time and period for nasty politics. A lot of the people that do it, not surprisingly, are outsiders.”

Zeitzoff compares Lyashko’s trajectory to that of Trump.



“He was not really a member of the Republican elite party. He came in and sucked a lot of oxygen with his flamboyant, inflammatory rhetoric. And, uniquely among party leaders, he did not stop once he became the de facto leader of the Republican Party.” 



The danger, Zeitzoff continues, comes when leaders at the top rungs of power deploy harmful rhetoric and harness antipathy, resulting in violence such as the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. 



“In other countries, when party leaders have been under criminal indictment or gone to trial—Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel––nasty politics has followed; Israel has had five elections in three years and 30 weeks of protest,” Zeitzoff says. “When party leaders are under criminal indictment or facing criminal charges, the level of rhetoric ratchets up and enters the mainstream and we have the real possibility of increased political violence.”



In Nasty Politics, Zeitzoff used New York Times historical data to chart US trends in such rhetoric over time, discovering two large peaks: one in the 1850s, in the lead-up to the Civil War, and the second in the last few decades, culminating in the 2016 presidential election.



“Polarization [in the US] has increased [since] the ’70s and ’80s,” he says. “Then, when Newt Gingrich came into Congress, he helped usher in an era of no-holds-barred power politics. Next, the Tea Party faction took over a large wing of the Republican Party, supporting a more confrontational style. The election of Trump then accelerated Democrats’ use of nasty rhetoric and talk about threats that Republicans posed.”



Similar dynamics played out in Israel before the October 2023 Israel-Hamas War, says Zeitzoff, noting polarization over security, attitudes toward the moribund peace process with Palestinians, and the role of religion in the nation. In Ukraine, before the outbreak of war in Donbas, there were growing divisions between those favoring more integration with Europe and those who prefer stronger ties with Russia. The brutal ongoing war with Russia has tempered these divisions, as Ukrainians have rallied around Zelensky. 



Zeitzoff maintains that the nastiness is concentrated among party elites, county- and state-level political operatives who help select local candidates––the backbone of partisan machines. He argues in the book that such mudslinging demobilizes voters, turning them off to political participation. 



However, when the stakes seem high, voters overcome their repulsion to dirty tactics—particularly those who are already comfortable with the idea of violence. Their attraction to the very element that sours others can change the nature of the coalition.



“The Republican Party is very different than [it] was 10 years ago,” Zeitzoff says. “People have come into that coalition who were maybe inactive, or maybe Blue Dog Democrats, whereas a lot of the Never Trump and hawkish foreign policy people have left. I mean, Bill Kristol is on MSNBC, right?”



While Zeitzoff insists that the average voter dislikes nasty politics and blames political elites for stooping to such strategies, he reveals an additional concern about the nation itself. 



“For a long time, we thought the US was immune from these populist leaders,” he says. “I think what we have shown, after January 6 and other events, is that the US isn’t as much of an outlier politically as we want. We elect populists. We have political instability. We had an insurrection.”