The conspiracy theories surrounding Soros have not been limited to remote corners of the internet but rather have become a central theme in populist politics around the globe. Next to the Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and even Donald Trump, Soros has been instrumentalised as a scapegoat most prominently by Viktor Orban in his “Stop Soros” campaign. The campaign drew heavily on new antisemitic tropes, for example, portraying Soros similarly to the “Laughing Jew” of Nazi propaganda or as the “puppet master” controlling his “soldiers” like marionettes.

A new paper by Hamrak, Jenne, Littvay, and Simonovits investigates the use of George Soros as a political cue in Viktor Orbán’s political communication. Next to testing the effectiveness of the Soros-cue, they also explore whether this mechanism works due to the activation of antisemitic attitudes.

Anti-Sorosism in Hungary

The case of Hungary is particularly interesting in this regard for two main reasons. Firstly, anti-Sorosism has been Orbán’s core political strategy since 2016, making him a widely known and recognised figure in Hungarian society. Anti-Sorosism has also been applied in the “national consultations”, which the Fidesz government holds approximately once a year since 2010. These surveys are purportedly meant to strengthen direct dialogue with citizens about the most pressing issues of the time, but have been criticised for their leading nature and the resulting Soviet-level support levels for government-preferred policies. Interestingly, Soros is referenced more than any other individual in these consultations. The authors theorise that Fidesz instrumentalises the negative perception of Soros, which it has created through its “Stop-Soros” campaign, to influence the citizenry’s policy preferences. By recreating this “real-life” campaign of Soros-cueing, the authors were able to run a highly realistic survey experiment with high external validity.

Secondly, Hungary presents relatively high levels of antisemitism in global comparison. According to the 2019 global ADL survey, with 71% of Hungarians agreeing to the statement “Jews have too much power in international financial markets”.

Cueing theory

To understand the dynamics underlying Orbán’s strategic use of Anti-Sorosism, the authors draw on cueing theory, which describes the idea that political cues can function like information shortcuts, anchoring voters’ opinions on various issues by connecting them to broader ideologies. This is especially useful for cases in which voters are not well-informed on or aware of, certain issues, since it allows them to form an opinion without having to be informed on the topic at hand.

Connecting cueing theory to the case of Soros, Hamrak et al. formulate two hypotheses:

HYPOTHESIS 1: Pairing policy proposals with Soros cues depresses the public support for policies disliked by the government.

The authors argue that cueing is particularly relevant for populist parties, such as Fidesz, due to their thin ideological basis and ambiguous policy positions. Further, they expect out-group cues, such as Soros, to be highly effective due to the rise of negative partisanship and partisan affective polarisation. By combining the above (elite) and beyond (Jewish) threat, Soros is constructed as a super-threat which serves to justify radical policy.

HYPOTHESIS 2: Soros elite cues depress policy support because they activate antisemitic attitudes in citizens.

The authors explain that while Anti-Sorosism is definitely antisemitic, they want to figure out whether antisemitism strengthens its function as a political cue. Their presupposition is based on automatic activation theory: If an individual holds a strong and accessible opinion about an object, mere exposure to that object can trigger associated attitudes. They argue that the long exposure of the Hungarian public to the “Stop Soros” campaign created antisemitic associations, which they expect to be triggered by Soros.

Experimental design

To test their hypotheses, the authors designed a sequential priming experiment in which antisemitic attitudes were randomly and independently manipulated. The sample consisted of 2,300 Hungarian respondents who were asked to give their opinion on nine different policy issues (e.g. energy politics, immigration). Half of them received antisemitic priming beforehand. For all respondents, the policy support questions were interrupted by an endorsement from Soros. The four groups (true control, only priming, only cued, cued and primed) were used to test the effectiveness of unprimed Soros cueing and of antisemitic activation.

Results

Hamrak et al. find that the Soros-cue had significant effects on voter polarisation: The endorsement reduced pro-government respondents’ support for the policy by ca. 2.6%. Pro-opposition respondents’ support rose by ca. 1.4%. In total, the Soros-cue increased the preference gap by 4% - almost half of the baseline gap of 9%. The most effective context for the Soros-cue was policy issues along the “transnational” divide (e.g. refugees), but the findings remained robust across issues.

Interestingly, the effects of cueing were not increased by the antisemitism priming, which only increased the self-reported antisemitism by ca. 1.5.%. Instead, a post-hoc analysis suggests that the intensity of the cueing effect was influenced by the strength of respondents’ partisan identity. The authors, thus, argue that Soros cues are interpreted through a partisan lens.

What does this mean for the role of elite cues in populist communication?

The study by Hamrak et al. presents evidence that Soros-cues function as orienting anchors along partisan lines, which suggests that negative out-group signaling can be used by populists to further increase us-versus-them divides and to mobilise voters on key policy issues.

What does this mean for the role of antisemitic out-group scapegoating in populist communication?

While the study does not find evidence for antisemitic activation driving the functioning of the Soros-cue, this may reflect the fact that in contemporary antisemitism, the antisemitic tropes retain their power while having become delinked from Jews themselves. Further, since the priming can only be applied overtly, the survey design was not able to test for the more latent form of new antisemitism. Hence, the authors caution that their findings should not be overinterpreted and call for further research into anti-globalist messaging by populist governments.