The Importance of Negative Emotions Toward the French Government in the Yellow Vest Movement

The Yellow Vests (YV) movement stands out because of its length and its unusual violent outbursts. This paper aims to better understand the emotional path underlying YVs’ intention to engage in more or less radical collective action. To this end, we opposed two models: one based on Becker and Tausch’s (2015) model of engagement in collective action – whereby only contempt is supposed to predict radical collective action – and one based on Matsumoto, Frank and Hwang’s (2017) ANCODI hypothesis – according to which anger, contempt and disgust as a whole are supposed to predict radical collective action. We assumed that support for the YVs’ demands would be associated with negative emotions (i.e., anger, contempt and disgust) towards the government which in turn would foster behavioral intentions in favor of YV. The results (Study 1, N = 677; Study 2, N = 738) confirmed this hypothesis and also showed that the model in which negative emotions (i.e., anger and contempt) are treated separately (i.e., Becker and Tausch’s model) presented a better fit with the data. Taken together, these results suggest that negative emotions towards the French president and his government have a key role in understanding the Yellow Vests mobilization.