Populism as Dog-Whistle Politics: Anti-Elite Discourse and Sentiments Toward Minority Groups

Abstract

Past research has devoted more attention to the consequences of populism for party politics and governance than to the effects of populist claims on public attitudes—and particularly, to how populism interacts with nationalism to exacerbate exclusionary beliefs among the public. Using online survey experiments, we examine whether exposure to populism increases out-group antipathy among white Democrats and Republicans. In Study 1, we randomly assign respondents to three conditions featuring vignettes based on political speeches: a morally neutral argument, a populist critique of political elites, and a morally framed anti-immigration appeal. We then assess respondents’ sentiments toward Latinos, an ethnic group commonly vilified in U.S. right-wing political discourse. The results demonstrate that exposure to populist rhetoric alone results in lower feeling-thermometer ratings of Latinos, but only among Republicans. Study 2 uses a similar design to evaluate the link between left-wing economic populism and economic nationalism: the populist condition features a critique of economic elites, the nationalist condition blames China for the offshoring of U.S. jobs, and the outcome variable measures respondents’ sentiments toward China. Economic nationalism generates increased chauvinism among conservative Democrats but economic populism does not. Together these findings suggest that the cross-domain spillover effects between nationalism and populism observed in Study 1 are driven by the discursive bundling of anti-elite talk with ethno-nationalism on the right, which stands in contrast to the decoupling of economic populism and economic nationalism on the left. The former has effectively turned populism into a form of dog-whistle politics among Republicans.

Populist and nativist attitudes: Does ingroup-outgroup thinking spill over across domains?

“…This is especially true of samples collected from online panels, which are often heterogeneous on unobserved variables, which makes repeated draws from the panel population difficult to compare. Given that scholars in the United States have found similar effects of populism on nativism (Bonikowski and Zhang, 2020), we are reasonably confident that the relationships observed in Experiment 1 are not spurious.…”

“…In this study, we hypothesize that exposure to populist or nativist messages activates general ingroup-outgroup thinking, and thereby fuels binary classification across cognitive domains (see Akrami et al., 2011; Zick et al., 2008). Specifically, we predict that exposure to populist messages may strengthen nativist attitudes (Bonikowski and Zhang, 2020), and exposure to nativist messages may increase populist attitudes. We expect such spillover effects to be observed, however, only among individuals who are susceptible to populist and nativist messages in the first place (see Hameleers and Schmuck, 2017; Kinder and Kam, 2010; Sniderman et al., 2004; Valkenburg and Peter, 2013).…”

State of the field: How to study populism and adjacent topics? A plea for both more and less focus

“…Hence, future studies might want to look at the extent to which populism and nativism (and other related concepts) are related to each other. Both are concrete manifestations of in‐group/out‐group thinking, so it might well be the case that at the individual level the two attitudes reinforce each other (see Bonikowski & Zhang ).…”

Populism and nationalism in a comparative perspective: a scholarly exchange

“…Nationalism infused with populism enables a politics of resentment and nostalgia, which is as much a battle against elites as it is a reassertion of dominance over ethnic, racial and cultural minorities. Indeed, anti‐elite claims can become a dog‐whistle for ethno‐nationalism, giving the latter plausible deniability and an air of respectability (Bonikowski & Zhang ). At the same time, because the political opposition is framed as a morally corrupt enemy of the nation, this justifies extraordinary measures against them, even if they require the violation of democratic norms (Levitsky & Ziblatt ).…”