Replication Data for: Incivility Does Not Exist: An Experimental Assessment on the Drivers of Incivility Perceptions and their Effects on Candidate Evaluations

Elite political discourse seems to have gotten too “uncivil.” But do we really all agree about this? Building upon the definition of incivility as norm-violating conduct, we argue that incivility does not exist per se as an objective reality, but only as a subjective and context-dependent perception. Specifically, this Stage 2 Registered Report postulates that what is deemed polite or impolite, as well as appropriate or inappropriate in political discourse – in essence, incivility perceptions – is contingent on the prevalent norms within a given social context, and within each individual. Based on this, we investigate how a range of contextual factors (i.e., the who, what and when of the communication act) and individual dispositions (i.e., political attitudes, social experiences, personality traits) shape incivility perceptions. We leverage data from a conjoint survey experiment run on a sample of 1884 American respondents, manipulating the characteristics of an “uncivil” attack – notably, who went uncivil, in which way, and in which circumstances. Largely contradicting what we hypothesized, our main results reveal that attacks are perceived as more uncivil in two sets of circumstances: (i) when they are uttered by candidates described as more aggressive, and (ii) when the electoral context in which the attack took place is depicted as being characterized by widespread incivility. Additional exploratory analyses show that political attacks were less likely to be seen as uncivil by individuals with authoritarian tendencies, higher populist beliefs, stronger feelings of social marginalization, and a “darker” personality profile. Finally, we demonstrate that the extent to which candidates are punished for “going uncivil” partially depends on how incivility is perceived within the context in which it occurs.