Measuring Frustration and Resentment in Politics: The Case of Chile 2017-2022

Political malaise and political attitudes have been highly studied for the last 60 years. Currently, however, there is a renewed interest in understanding the phenomenon through different disciplines. The rise of populist and nationalist narratives in consolidated and emergent democracies has justified studies about underlying individual and territorial elements. Thus, it is usually stated that those citizens who live in certain places—that have experienced an economic decline—are more likely to feel anger and powerless, which impact electoral preferences. In this context, our work offers a methodological proposal to study this phenomenon. Using 9,900 face-to-face cases collected between 2017 and 2022 in the Chilean region of Valparaiso, we build two variables to distinguish between the feeling flow (frustration) and the accumulative sentiment (resentment) in political disaffection. Thus, this paper seeks to contribute to the literature by identifying in a better way the different elements of malaise, including the temporal dimension. At the same time, this contribution would help us to determine some tools to face this phenomenon.

With P. Aroca and F. Sánchez-Barría