Populism as a socio-psychological concept
Few concepts are currently as debated, yet contested, as populism. Over the last decade, populism has emerged as a social and political force across many European countries. Contemporary societies have a “populist moment” (Mouffe, 2018) with deep implications for democratic governance, political legitimacy and social cohesion. Often decried as a “threat” to liberal democracy by scholars, pundits and mainstream politicians, its psychological roots and processes remain however poorly understood. Complementing recent populism research in political science and communication sciences, the present proposal contributes to fill this gap with an ambitious research programme to study the attitudinal structure, antecedents and outcomes of populist representations in a crossnational perspective. Based in social and political psychology, our research offers new insights for an ideational approach to populism that considers populism neither to be limited to a simplistic political style or discourse, nor to marginal fringe movements jeopardising the democratic process with irrational and emotional behaviours. Instead, we
consider populist thinking to define significant and heterogeneous segments of contemporary national populations who are united in anchoring their views on society in an irreconcilable opposition between the “people” and the “elite”. Yet, this founding antagonism of populist representations takes on many forms depending on individual, group-based and contextual factors that will be examined in this research. An important extension to our work now consists in the study of the epistemological correlates of populism: developing on a nascent approach, we decided to investigate populism as a form of lay epistemology stressing the importance of people’s ‘common sense’, a form knowledge which is perceived as more direct, immediate and practical than scientific knowledge.
A crossnational study with multiple strategies
Our empirical approach is based on three data strategies.
First: we collect data for our own Populist Representations Survey across different countries. The survey questionnaire includes both novel and already tested items from the large literature on populist thinking. Currently, surveys have been fielded in Brazil, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland with respondents ranging from around 700 up to 1200.
Second, we rely on the European Social Survey (ESS – link) to add to the previous cross-sectional study, a longitudinal approach where we investigate the evolving nature of populist attitudes.
Finally, we are currently complementing the correlational survey data with a series of experimental studies in Switzerland to test different hypotheses concerning the relationship between populist representations and personal/collective identity as well as emotions. In order to study the contextually contingent interplay between processes of vertical and horizontal differentiation that define the varying expressions of contemporary populism in Europe, our research design on populist representations is thus cross-nationally comparative, correlational, longitudinal and experimental.