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The Social Psychology of Populism: March 2020
The Social Psychology of Populism: March 2020
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Paris Aslanidis
Yale University
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agenda to fill the gap, focusing on the social psychological dynamics of the cru
cial dichotomy between people and elites that underpins populist discourse. The
core argument of my analysis is that populist entrepreneurs manage to sever
voters from their existing political allegiances by discursively politicizing the
social identity of “the people” to benefit from the normative effects of self-
categorization. Thus, ingroup favoritism encourages support for the populist
party or leader, while outgroup derogation solidifies the identity of the populist
camp by “othering” political opponents associated with “elites.”
where “individuals tend to define and see themselves less as differing individual
persons and more as the interchangeable representatives of some shared social
category membership” (Turner, Oakes, Haslam, & McGarty, 1994). While per
sonal identities influence our self-interpretation as unique individuals, social
identities operate at a higher level of abstraction (Stürmer & Simon, 2004). In
other words, self-categorization—through depersonalization—shifts our assess
ment of reality from a personal identity viewpoint to a social identity one, from
thinking in terms of “I” to thinking in terms of “we.” This, in and of itself, is
not however a necessary invidious attitude. While different explanations have
been suggested, Tajfel and Turner saw self-categorization as the manifestation of
an inherent human need to hold on to positive group identities in our effort to
sustain a healthy level of individual self-esteem and personal value.
How can we determine whether an individual will indeed experience depersonal
ization vis-à-vis a specific group identity? SCT’s answer is that the person is
required to perceive this identity as reflecting their expectations, values, motives,
and needs, as conditioned by the existing social context. More specifically, group
identification has both a cognitive and an evaluative component, represented
respectively by the concepts of comparative fit and normative fit (Turner et al.,
1994). Comparative fit is governed by the principle of meta-contrast, which states
that we may consider including ourselves into a group if we perceive our intra-class
differences as significantly smaller compared to inter-class differences within
a given frame of reference (Turner et al., 1987). The ingroup must be seen as intern
ally coherent and adequately distinct from competitive groups. However, mere vari
ation is insufficient on its own; the category’s contents also matter. Normative fit
refers to the requirement that the emerging difference between the focal category
and its background exhibits consistency with our “normative beliefs and theories
about the substantive social meaning of the social category” (Turner et al., 1994,
p. 455). The prospective ingroup must exhibit uniqueness and moral merit.
The socio-cognitive passage from “I” behavior to “we” behavior is pivotal for
political mobilization. Empirical studies have repeatedly confirmed that alle
giance to partisan identities explains electoral behavior better than alternative
theories (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960; Conover, 1984; Huddy,
Mason, & Aarøe, 2015). It is now trivial to point out that political attitudes are
frequently group-based, arising “from basic cognitive categorization processes
that partition the social world into ingroups and outgroups” (Brewer, 2007,
p. 695). Moreover, strategic agency in political contestation entails that otherwise
regular processes of social categorization may become exacerbated “through
deliberate manipulation by group leaders in the interests of mobilizing collective
action to secure or maintain political power” (Brewer, 2007, p. 703). Politicians
are able—if not obligated—to do this because group-relevant appeals carry
greater legitimacy over claims couched in terms of personal utility (Brewer,
2001). This inherently moral element in the mobilization of political identities
(Gamson, 1992) tends to prioritize collective causes over the explicit pursuit of
personally beneficial outcomes.
The social psychology of populism 169
mobilization, yet the social identity of “the people” is usually moot in the
absence of a social dilemma to render it salient.
Put differently, as citizens, we may be passively exhibiting allegiance to our
social identity of “the people,” but we are not necessarily assertive about it
(cf. Dalton & Welzel, 2014). The identity of “the people” possesses
a notorious fluidity that can even hamper mobilization due to its failure to
exhibit quotidian relevance. Populist identity entrepreneurs need to struggle
hard to provide a mobilizing impetus before the psychological benefits of
social categorization can foster wider recruitment. They thus strategically con
struct the ingroup to be as wide as possible, while accentuating its differences
to a specific outgroup. The outcome is a strictly dichotomous identity space
where inclusion in the populist ingroup is the only morally appropriate political
self-categorization outcomes.
The wide scope of the populist social identity and the inward permeability of
the boundaries of “the people” are key factors. According to SCT, self-
categorization into overlapping social identities follows a hierarchical system of
classification (e.g., Chelsea FC fan, Londoner, British, European, liberal) that
operates at different levels of abstraction according to the level of inclusivity in
each identity. Given the hierarchical structure of politically relevant social iden
tities, politicians benefit the most when they accentuate identities at the higher end
of the scale because, at the margin, electoral returns are greater when a larger pro
portion of the general audience is involved (Reicher & Hopkins, 1996).
This is where populists, with their disdain for sectoral interests and their
emphasis on the hyper-inclusivity of the valued category of “the people,” have
an advantage vis-à-vis their competitors. Open to enlisting any sort of societal
grievance (as long as it can be envisioned within the wider struggle between
people and elites) while at the same time prohibiting salience for less-inclusive
nested identities (e.g., worker, Catholic, student), populists effectively censor
competing calculations of identity structures, limiting self-categorization exclu
sively to the hierarchically superordinate level that is occupied by the populist
ingroup. They thus discursively encompass the whole spectrum of positively
valenced political identities, aiming to draw maximum support from the gen
eral pool of voters who feel part of “the people,” regardless of potential incom
patibilities in social identification at lower levels of inclusiveness.
Populists will therefore downplay subordinate “we” identities, declaring
them irrelevant compared to the ultimate political goal, the restoration of
popular sovereignty. During the Great Recession, for instance, populist move
ment entrepreneurs were extremely vigilant maintaining the monopoly of the
populist “we” identity. Conscious of the dangers of allowing subordinate
identities to produce centrifugal anomalies in the fragile social coalition they
were constructing, they aligned their populist framing in such a way as to
underplay the role of nation, religion, class, and other competing social cat
egories that could split the movement into competing factions (Aslanidis,
2016b, 2018; Gerbaudo, 2017).
The social psychology of populism 171
The populist ingroup is not only constructed wide enough to be virtually all-
encompassing, its boundaries are also further depicted so as to be asymmetric
ally permeable. Due to its normative and apartisan standing, the social identity
of “the people” presents minimal barriers to entry, allowing the individual to
incur limited costs in acquiring it, compared to other political identities. For
instance, the psychological strain involved in shedding a previously cherished
conservative political identity to join a progressive ingroup (and vice versa)
can be enormous. On the contrary, members of either group can more readily
activate the universally venerated baseline value of popular sovereignty and
join the populist cause. This allows populists to drive a wedge into the existing
structure of political identities and encroach into adjacent constituencies.
Furthermore, populist discourse enlists outgroup derogation as a means of
recursively enhancing ingroup cohesion. Because self-categorization is inherently
comparative, the salience of group membership entails accentuating intragroup
similarities as well as intergroup differences. Therefore, ingroup behavior leads
to a cognitive and affective “dichotomization of the social world into clearly dis
tinct and non-overlapping categories” (Tajfel, 1974, p. 88). However, intergroup
conflict is not a predetermined outcome. Populists discursively construct their
ingroup wide enough to subsume and police competing social identities, and
then direct intergroup hostility toward those who by populist fiat are refused
inclusion into the body of the people. While these targets may either be specific
individuals or collective interest groups, it is essential that they are seen as form
ing a discernible outgroup. Persistent derogation in the name of the ingroup
elicits an “outgroup homogeneity effect,” a “tendency for within-group accentu
ation of similarity to apply to outgroups rather more than it does to ingroups”
(Oakes, 2001, p. 11). Outgroup members are made to “all look alike.” While the
ingroup hosts all those entertaining socially beneficial goals, elites do not repre
sent equally legitimate political perspectives and thus have no legitimate social
bearing; they are self-serving. What holds “them” together is their desire to
retain their ill-acquired privileges as members of “a caste,” “an oligarchy,”
a handful of oppressors of the vast majority of “the 99%.”
Together, depersonalization and intergroup polarization facilitate a sense of
urgency to overthrow “the system” that stacks the deck against “us.” Depend
ing on the salience of the acquired populist identity, the individual may switch
altogether from expressing grievances as a personal predicament to perceiving
their interests in terms of “the needs, goals and motives associated with
ingroup membership” (Turner et al., 1987, p. 65). Therefore, populists consist
ently avoid assigning unmitigated primacy to particular grievances that may
become contested; instead, they strive to deflect attention away from the
intragroup discrepancies of their constituency by stressing their differences—as
a whole—with the elite outgroup.
Because residual (non-populist) identities are denied moral legitimacy and no
alternative positive identity can exist at the same level of inclusivity as “the
people,” the identity field is thereby effectively dichotomized. The audience is
172 Paris Aslanidis
presented with a stark choice either acquire the positive social identity of “the
people” and join the ingroup in its struggle for popular sovereignty, or retain
your old political allegiances and risk becoming “othered” as a disciple of the
morally discredited elite. In this sense, populism can be seen as an amalgam of
an “identity identity” of “we, the people” and an “anti-identity identity” as “we,
the anti-elite.” The populist identity entrepreneur will interchangeably focus
on solidifying the ingroup ex positivo by stressing the moral primacy of popular
sovereignty, or ex negativo by investing in the cultivation of the anti-identity
aspect. However, before the group-distinctive perceptions of populism can pre
scribe political behavior, its entrepreneurs must eventually weave the two
together into a coherent narrative because, conceptually, populism requires their
combination (Aslanidis, 2016a).
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