Right‐wing populism as a social representation: A comparison across four European countries

Abstract

The rise of right‐wing populist parties has been widely discussed across the social sciences during the last decade. Taking a social representational approach, we analyse organising principles and anchoring of right‐wing populist thinking across four European countries (France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom). Using European Social Survey data (Round 7), we compare political attitudes and self‐appraisals of citizens identifying with right‐wing populist, conservative right‐wing, and traditional left‐wing parties. The findings converge across the four countries to show that right‐wing populist identifiers diverge from both left‐ and right‐wing identifiers on vertical (between the “people” and the “elite”) and horizontal (between nationals and immigrants) dimensions of differentiation. Depending on the context, right‐wing populist identification was fuelled by material and physical insecurity, low political efficacy, and distrust of fellow citizens. We conclude that right‐wing populism requires multiple strategies of differentiation within and between groups to justify and sustain itself.

If you want to be one of us, then become like us: The evaluation of naturalization applicants by host nationals

“…Also, the differential treatment applied to naturalization applicants based on their ethnonational group membership—devalued versus valued origin—highlights the fact that ethnic criteria still condition social inclusion of immigrant groups in the national community (Kadianaki & Andreouli, ; Reijerse et al, ). The comeback of ethnicity as an exclusionary factor in public opinion across European countries may be even more important in the near future, due to the increased number of resettled asylum seekers, and the related threat mobilized by right‐wing populist parties (Green, ; Green, Visintin, & Sarrasin, ; Staerklé & Green, ). In addition, we found only scant evidence of a mitigating effect of multicultural policy on the assimilation pressure faced by naturalization applicants from devalued countries.…”

Motivational and affective drivers of right-wing populism support: Insights from an Austrian presidential election

“…What appears most notable to us, however, is the possibility RWPP may mobilize their supporters by fuelling negative feelings (and anger in particular) through hate narratives that depict external targets as enemies of the native majority. RWPP supporters perceive their ingroup in vertical opposition to "the elite" and in horizontal opposition to "cultural others" such as immigrants (Staerklé & Green, 2018). Scholars suggests that RWPP may induce feelings of relative deprivation between these different groups to mobilize their supporters (Jetten, Ryan, & Mols, 2017;Mols & Jetten, 2014).…”

Populist polarization in postcolonial Philippines: Sociolinguistic rifts in online drug war discourse

“…To set the conceptual foundations for this study, the succeeding sections are organized as follows. First, we briefly review the rich social psychological literature on populism and polarization, highlighting the importance and dearth of Global South perspectives (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014; Pettigrew, 2017; Staerklé & Green, 2018). Second, we introduce a discourse‐historical lens to ground our analytical focus on language in relation to our postcolonial perspective (Clary‐Lemon, 1970; Sakki & Pettersson, 2016).…”