Political identities: The missing link in the study of populism

Abstract

Political identities are crucial for understanding electoral behavior: individuals who identify with a political party behave as loyal supporters who would hardly vote for competitors old or new. Although this is an obvious observation, it has received little attention in the study of populism—a set of ideas that not only portrays established political parties as corrupt and self-serving entities but also depicts “the people” as a homogenous and virtuous community that should run the government. In this contribution, we develop a novel theory that claims that populism can thrive only when an antiestablishment political identity exists. This identity denotes an emotional and rational repulsion toward all established political parties in a given country. We test our theory by analyzing original survey data from contemporary Chile. The empirical analysis reveals not only that a limited segment of the electorate holds an antiestablishment political identity coalesced by populism but also that there is a large segment of apartisans adverse to populism. These empirical findings have important consequences for the study of populism, particularly when it comes to analyzing its emergence and electoral potential.

The populist citizen: Empirical evidence from Europe and Latin America

“…1 This paved the way for Akkerman et al (2014), who developed a similar battery of six survey items to gauge populist ideas in the Netherlands. Since then, a developing literature uses the same or a close variant of these items to undertake empirical research in various European and Latin American contexts (Akkerman et al, 2017;Jacobs et al, 2018;Hawkins et al, 2018b;Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019;Marcos-Marne et al, 2019). What do these contributions tell us about populism at the mass level?…”

Widening the Divide between Them and Us? The Effects of Populist Communication on Cognitive and Affective Stereotyping in a Comparative European Setting

“…In this paper, we postulate that populist communication can be understood as such an important supply-side factor that can make message-congruent responses more salient and in line with populist perceptions. Thus, in line with the ideational approach to populism (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019;Meléndez & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019), we expect that when populist frames that emphasize a divide between us and them are credible for receivers, they can activate messagecongruent perceptions on the demand-side of voters.…”

“…Populist attitudes can be understood as individual-level support for (parts of) the ideational core of populism (e.g., Akkerman et al, 2014;Schulz et al, 2017). Because populist attitudes are relatively stable attitudes that are not easily affected by exposure to single messages in people's communication environment, the effect of populist communication should rather be understood as activating or making salient traits or schemata in individuals that correspond to populist interpretations, such as a specific set of in-and out-group identities (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019;Hawkins et al, 2018;Meléndez & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2019). In this paper, we do not directly look at the effects of populist communication on populist attitudes, but conceptualize support for, or alignment with, elements of the populist ideology in a different, indirect way: as the perceived distance between the in-group of the people and the out-group of the elites.…”

The Failure of Islamic Populism: The Case of Indonesia’s 2019 Election

“…But on the other hand, populism is seen as threatening democracy. This is especially so if populism is peppered with identity politics as written by Meléndez and Kaltwasser [6]. Populist movements can emerge if society has an antiestablishment political identity that is flavoured with the language of populism.…”