Do Populist Leaders Mimic the Language of Ordinary Citizens? Evidence From India

Minimal understandings of populism focus on measuring explicit stances of antielitism and people centrism. What remains poorly understood is the way less overt forms of populist rhetoric enable leaders to emulate the language of common citizens to achieve electoral success. This article suggests that the study of the populist discourse also requires taking into account their implicit occurrences, that is, those conveying connect, closeness, commonness, and similarity with ordinary people. Expressed through performances of “layman likeness,” they enable populist politicians to dissociate from traditional ruling elites while enabling people leaders' identifications. Using a novel 261-million-word dataset of Indian political discourses—including the speeches of 11 Prime Ministers—to proxy such identifications, we argue that populist leaders rely on a mimesis of the common people. Three core mimetic speech items are quantified: intimacy, disintermediation, and simplicity. We use a replicable corpus-contextual multiword collocation technique to populate lexicons of pretested psychometric profiles as well as a threefold validation method. The analysis finds that current Prime Minister Narendra Modi communicates mimetic identification around his persona, indexing the linguistic markers of his stylistic, ideological, and institutional populist politics. We indicate that our context-aware method could also be of use to study the cross-regional variability of mimetic populism.     

Psychological similarities and dissimilarities between left-wing and right-wing populists: Evidence from a nationally representative survey in France

Research in political science has focused on definitions of populism, platforms of populist parties, and demographic characteristics of those who support populist parties. Yet little is known about the psychological characteristics of populist supporters and how they might differ as a function of left-right ideology. Using a measure of populist attitudes in general, we investigated the role of Big Five personality traits as well as authoritarianism, social dominance, and system justification in a nationally representative sample of French respondents. We observed meaningful variability in relations between psychological characteristics and the endorsement of populist attitudes as a function of left-right ideological orientation, as well as variability in the psychological predictors of support for Jean Luc Mélenchon (a left-wing populist) and Marine LePen (a right-wing populist). We conclude that left-wing and right-wing populists are not the same, psychologically speaking, and that the differences are consistent with the distinction between inclusionary and exclusionary forms of populism.     

Psychological Correlates of Populist Attitudes

Studies of demand-side populism with a focus on attitudinal and behavioral factors are becoming more popular, but only a few have explored the phenomenon's psychological determinants. We tackle the lack of conversation between populism scholars and political psychologists and test the impact of conspiracy beliefs, moral disengagement, need for cognition, and belief in simple solutions on populist attitudes. We use the most widespread ideational definition in an attempt to bring clarity to demand-side populism, as the literature often conflates the concept of populism with adjacent ideological and psychological factors. We analyze representative samples from two very different countries (Italy and Turkey) to test our hypotheses. We use two of the most often-used measures of populist attitudes and also explore populism's individual building blocks: people-centrism, antielitism, and a Manichean worldview. We consistently find conspiracy beliefs (and our control variable of institutional trust) as primary sources of populist attitudes, whereas the impact of the other psychological factors is more dependent on context and operationalization. Our article calls for more conceptual clarity, careful theorization, and more work on the refinement of available survey measures. We also highlight the importance of national contexts and the dangers of generalization based on individual country studies.     

Mapping Contentious Collective Emotions in a Populist Democracy: Duterte's Push for Philippine Federalism

This article analyzes collective emotions toward political change in a populist democracy. Taking the federalization of the Philippines led by President Rodrigo Duterte as an exemplar case, we extend prevailing scholarship which focuses on populist leaders' electoral discourse by examining the affective landscape of the populist public in a postelectoral context. Utilizing a sequential mixed-methods design, we algorithmically classify the stance and sentiment valence of 18,535 Facebook comments about federalism, then we reflexively identify collective emotions based on major discursive storylines across each stance-sentiment intersection. Our integrated analysis reveals collective feelings of (1) hope and euphoria and (2) vindictive contempt among supporters of Duterte's federalism, while detractors of the campaign express (3) derisive amusement and (4) fear and skepticism. Two of these public emotions may be idiosyncratic to Global South populisms: public fear and president-invested salvific hope. We discuss the implications of our findings along themes of emotional polarization in a populist democracy, linking political affect with democratic participation through social media.     

Voting “Against Islamization”? How Anti‐Islamic Right‐Wing,Populist Political Campaign Ads Influence Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Muslims as Well as Voting Preferences

We explore the effects of anti‐Islamic right‐wing, populist political campaign ads on voting intention for a right‐wing populist party using a quota‐based online experiment (N = 174). Additionally, we investigate implicit attitudes (i.e., automatic affective associations) and explicit attitudes (i.e., overtly expressed evaluations) toward Muslims as underlying mechanisms of these effects. We find that exposure to the political campaign ads prompts explicit hostile attitudes toward Muslims mediated by implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes in turn shape voting intention. Moreover, implicit attitudes toward Muslims predict voting preference beyond the influence of explicit attitudes. Thus, resentments toward Muslims may foster voters’ support for anti‐Islamic right‐wing populist parties even “under the radar” of conscious awareness. In sum, this study demonstrates for the first time the entire process of right‐wing, populist political campaign ads’ effects on voting preferences via implicit and explicit attitudes toward Muslims.     

Narrative congruence between populist President Duterte and the Filipino public: Shifting global alliances from the United States to China

This research examines what happened when the populist Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte reversed his country's global alliance, switching loyalties away from the United States towards China. We use the lens of narrative congruence, to see if political storylines of a populist president are accompanied by similar shifts in storylines among his followers. Our data corpus consists of text from Duterte's speeches and from comments on partisan Facebook pages, representing supporters and opponents of the president. We time‐bound our data corpus to text produced around the time President Duterte announced his realignment towards China. We use text mining and network analysis to identify overlaps among words used by the different social actors. Our findings show that when Duterte switched alliances, Facebookers—regardless of partisanship—accepted this alliance shift. However, our results likewise reveal an imperfect congruence. Duterte's followers move on to a story criticizing Duterte's domestic political enemies, whereas anti‐Duterte Facebookers talk about monetary deals and drug issues in the Philippines' newfound friendship with China. We discuss our findings in the light of a psychology of populism, the use of a discursive social networks approach to study macropsychological phenomena, and discursive resistance in a populist state.     

Pride in our community: Reflecting on LGBTQ publications in the American Journal of Community Psychology

In this Virtual Special Issue (VSI), we curate and discuss a set of 28 articles previously published in the American Journal of Community Psychology (AJCP) focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. The purpose of this VSI is to bring visibility to this body of scholarship in AJCP and to reflect on how the strengths of our field have been used throughout this work in pursuit of supporting LGBTQ wellbeing. In this VSI, we first discuss articles that help to set the historical background for publications in AJCP. We then discuss papers under the broad themes of HIV/AIDS, identities within ecological context, and social activism among LGBTQ communities. We then reflect on opportunities for our field to further leverage our strengths in contributing to LGBTQ scholarship. Overall, this VSI celebrates the contributions to LGBTQ research already present in AJCP, and we hope inspires future contributions to the pages of AJCP and beyond.     

Religion and right-wing populism in Italy: using ‘Judeo-Christian roots’ to kill the European Union

ABSTRACT

This contribution offers new directions to explore how implicitly religious customs and norms may influence voting for right-wing populist parties. It also suggests an indirect influence of government regulation of religion on the rise of populism in the European Union. The church–state relationship is viewed as providing a stable context for religious biases to emerge, thereby enabling populist forces to capitalise on a sense of loss of national identity which in turn reinforces citizens’ negative attitude towards immigrants, particularly of different religious backgrounds. Combining the Religion and State Project Round 3 (RAS3) dataset with electoral and socio-demographic data, this contribution presents time-series analyses and linear regression in order to explore the impact of religious factors on populist voting patterns and support for the Italian Eurosceptic populist movement, the League, between 1992 and 2014. I argue that the success of this populist party lies in its ability to use an adaptive mythology that plays on pre-existing religious norms to stoke fears of a decline of cultural homogeneity and a loss of political and economic power.     

Colonialism and Psychology of Culture

There has long been a criticism that scholarship devoted to the study of cultural variation in psychology has too easily ascribed the observed differences between different societies to essentialized notions of ‘culture’ while paying less attention to historical forces that shape these differences. In this paper, we argue that the conceptual frameworks of cross‐cultural and cultural psychology should allow for analysis of how major geopolitical events and historical processes bear on people's lives. Specifically, we point to colonialism, a discussion that has been less attended to in psychology, and argue that colonialism and its legacies exert a powerful influence on many worldwide populations. Analysis of colonialism and its legacies necessarily calls for attention to its prominent ideological cornerstones: race and ‘culture’, which are also central concepts in psychology as a global discipline. In psychology, colonialism has primarily been engaged in two ways: the study of the colonial impact on individuals; and the consideration of the colonial impact on the discipline and practice of psychology in formerly colonized nation states. We review this engagement and introduce examples of scholarship from each. This paper challenges the field to pay greater attention to sociopolitical discourses and historical contexts and, in turn, to theorize culture in ways that are responsive to the fluidity and complexity of social lives.     

Other than obedient: Girls' constructions of doctors and treatment regimes for anorexia nervosa

This paper examines how teenage girls diagnosed with and being treated for anorexia nervosa in hospital construct their anorexia, their identity as patients, medical authority and their doctors. In‐depth interviews were conducted with 25 adolescent girls in two large, metropolitan hospitals in Australia. Using a discourse analytic approach informed by poststructural theory, we elucidate how girls perform as patients, contest the authoritative position of doctors and deploy popular, taken‐for‐granted discourses of femininity to resist treatment regimes and the construction of themselves by others as ‘anorexic’ and ‘sick’. Our analysis indicates that medical discourses in the hospital do not necessarily define or delimit girls' constructions of themselves, of anorexia, treatment or their relationships with doctors. The paper argues that understanding and validating girls' perspectives is essential in building and maintaining a therapeutic alliance in hospitals. We conclude by discussing how insights from poststructural analysis can assist in improving hospital practice. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs

This article provides a comparative study of the discursive construction and use of Otherness among anti‐immigration populist radical right politicians in Sweden and Finland. Based on rhetorical and critical discursive psychology, our analyses of discourse within nine political blogs identified three distinct representations of Otherness. These representations of a deviant group of people, of a threatening ideology and of inner enemies are highly familiar from previous research on radical right discourse. However, what seems to characterize populist radical right discourse in the Nordic context is the strong reliance on the rhetorical juxtaposition between the welfare system and immigration. Our study furthermore highlights how populist radical right politicians exploit the digital discursive tools provided by political blogging. These tools, first, create a sense of connectedness and mutual understanding between blogger and reader and, second, allow the blogger to convey messages that are hostile towards immigrants and ethnic minorities without expressing an explicit personal opinion. In combination, the features provided by political blogging and the discursive and rhetorical strategies that deny racism make discourse within a populist radical right political blog especially powerful and convincing. We conclude that research must be sensitive to this ‘digital discourse’, as it reaches a public far beyond the sphere of a political blog through its potential to spread and influence mainstream media.     

Good Workers and Crooked Bosses: The Effect of Voice Suppression by Supervisors on Employees’ Populist Attitudes and Voting

This study is the first to explore the effect of political socialization in the workplace on populist attitudes. We investigate the effect of workplace voice suppression on employees' populist attitudes and voting. We expect employees who were suppressed by supervisors to hold more populist attitudes and to be more likely to vote for a populist party than employees who were not. We argue that some employees experience voice suppression by supervisors as stressful, so splitting is likely to be employed as a defense mechanism. Splitting is achieved through cognitive distinction and antagonism between “the good workers” and “the crooked bosses.” Such a split mental framework can generalize into a worldview that contrasts “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite,” a core characteristic of populism. We predict that the extent to which suppression triggers splitting and consequentially incites populist attitudes and voting depends on employees' acceptance of power distance. We test our hypotheses using SEM on survey data from 2990 members of the Dutch labor force. Our results show that experiences of voice suppression are positively related to populist attitudes and populist voting. As expected, this effect is stronger for employees who are less accepting of power distance.     

Make America gracious again: Collective nostalgia can increase and decrease support for right-wing populist rhetoric

Democracies across the globe are shaken by a new class of populist right-wing politicians. A defining element of right-wing populism is a preference for antagonistic rhetoric to describe opponents. Three studies connect support for right-wing populist rhetoric to collective nostalgia for the past. Importantly, the results show that collective nostalgia can both increase and decrease support for right-wing populist antagonistic rhetoric, depending on how the past is conceptualized. Nostalgia for a past characterized by political incorrectness is associated with increased support, whereas nostalgia for the past's greater decorum is associated with decreased support for right-wing populism. Studies 1 and 2 show this with vignettes. Study 3 measures support for Trump and the GOP in the 2018 midterm elections. Although right-wing populism is often seen as the result of a wave of nostalgia, our results show that this link can be disconnected and even reversed.     

Economic inequality and the rise of far‐right populism: A social psychological analysis

It is argued that far‐right (FR) populism in the West is fuelled by inequality. In this paper, we argue that three social psychological processes are central to explaining these phenomena. We suggest that these processes are recursive although we do not specify their temporal order. Drawing on the social identity tradition, we first examine how inequality is linked to reduced social trust and cohesion, which has consequences for both low‐ and high‐income groups. We examine the known effects of perceived threat in amplifying tensions between groups and consolidating identity positions. Second, we argue that national identity consolidation is a particularly likely response to inequality, which, in turn, reduces tolerance of cultural diversity as an associated consequence. Finally, we consider the value of these strengthened national identities to those who harness them effectively to gain political ground. In this way, those who offer FR populist rhetoric aligned with nationalism can blame immigrants, “foreign” powers, and mainstream politics for both the lack of social cohesion and reduced economic circumstances of many. We conclude that FR populist leaders not only tap into the negative social consequences of inequality, their policy positions also fail to address and may even compound the situation.     

From body to body: A post‐gender politics for the cosmic homo1

This article engages in establishing some common ground, some human and humane politics for the global Luther, in contradistinction to the focus in much recent scholarship on difference/s as an almost hegemonic way of understanding human life. The aim is to move beyond feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories to a post‐gender politics by employing Judith Butler's concepts of performativity and “abject” bodies. Homo, the human being, will be the hermeneutical key for examining Luther's understanding of God's creation and incarnation as well as of baptism, the Lord's Supper, and the church. The aim is that of searching out Luther's differing performances of body, from the carnal body of the incarnate Christ and the human body to the spiritual body of church and community, and how these matter, materialize and intersect in the body of Christ as one body/homo.     

Counterfactuals and Historical Possibility

We show that truth conditions for counterfactuals need not always be given in terms of a vague notion of similarity. To this end, we single out the important class of historical counterfactuals and give formally rigorous truth conditions for these counterfactuals, employing a partial ordering relation called “comparative closeness” that is defined in the framework of branching space-times. Among other applications, we provide a detailed analysis of counterfactuals uttered in the context of lost bets. In an appendix we compare our theory with the branching space-times based reading of counterfactuals recently proposed by Belnap.     

Queering Bem: Theoretical Intersections Between Sandra Bem’s Scholarship and Queer Theory

Sandra Bem revolutionized psychology with her research on gender, androgyny, and gender schematicity, which culminated in her book, The Lenses of Gender. Her work also provides a model for how to cross inter-disciplinary lines to enhance scholarship and reach political goals. We analyze similarities and differences between Bem’s scholarship and scholarship in queer theory, a theoretical movement in the humanities that analyzes discourses that construct man/woman and straight/gay binaries. There are important overlaps between Bem’s lenses of gender (biological essentialism, gender polarization, and androcentrism) and the ideas of many queer theorists. There are also several interesting differences between Bem’s ideas and queer theory: attention to the intrapsychic processes that make up gender, the extent to which individuals can be liberated from gender, proliferating versus contesting gender, intersectionality, and epistemology and methodology. By assessing the similarities and differences between Bem and queer theorists, we show that the two complement each other, affording a better understanding of gender and sexuality. Additionally, both Bem and queer theory lend insight into feminist and queer activism. The theoretical and political advances that can be made by integrating Bem’s ideas and those of queer theorists serve as examples for why it is worthwhile to cross disciplinary lines.     

The Learning Sciences in a New Era of U.S. Nationalism

What responsibilities do researchers of learning have in the wake of Trump's election and the proliferation of far-right, populist nationalism across the globe? In this essay, we seek to prompt and engage a dialogue about the political role and responsibilities of our field at this historical moment. First, we situate the social hierarchies that were most pronounced during this election within a longer history of U.S. policies and practices. We then examine the ostensible division between research on learning and the political contexts and consequences of learning. We argue for the need to address this false chasm and build on scholarship that has demonstrated the inextricable links among learning, power, and politics. We conclude by exploring how research on learning might more meaningfully engage with the political dimensions of learning through teaching, engaged research, publishing, professional forums, and service.     

Sketching the Contours of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion

This article argues that there is an identifiable scholarship of teaching and learning in theology and religion that, though varied in its entry points and forms, exhibits standards of excellence recognizable in other forms of scholarship. Engaging in this scholarship enhances a professor's possession of practice and often reveals insights into student learning and the contours of a field that can advance both educational and disciplinary projects. Through conversation with a form of the scholarship of teaching and learning that emerged most clearly in work associated with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, we describe starting points and generative assumptions that have been employed in the discourse of the scholarship of teaching and learning in theology and religion as they have emerged in submissions to Teaching Theology and Religion over the past decade and a half and point to its benefits. See responses to this essay by Charles R. Foster , Stephen Brookfield , and Pat Hutchings published in this issue of the journal. Responses by Reid B. Locklin, Joanne Maguire Robinson, and Nadine S. Pence appear in next issue issue, 16:3 (2013).