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Power to the people : disidentification with the government and support for populism

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Urbanska_2020_JTSP_Power_AAM.pdf (322.6Kb)
Date
18/05/2021
Author
Urbanska, Karolina
Pehrson, Samuel
Guimond, Serge
Keywords
Populism
Populist attitudes
Voting
Social identity
Government
Non-voters
BF Psychology
DAS
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Abstract
Populist attitudes have been shown to predict voting behaviour. These attitudes consist of a belief that everyday citizens are better judges of what is best for their own country than politicians and that the political elites are corrupt. As such, a clear ‘us’ (pure and good everyday citizens) and ‘them’ (the evil political elite) rhetoric is present. In the present research, we propose that identification with the government may predict whether people would vote for, and whether they have voted in the past for, a populist party (either from the political left or the political right). The present research (N = 562), carried out among French citizens, showed that lower government identification related to past voting behaviour, current voting intentions and likelihood to switch from a non-populist to a populist party. Identification with the government was also negatively associated to intention to abstain from voting. Moreover, government identification was a stronger predictor of these voting-related outcomes than the recently developed populist attitudes measures. Unexpectedly, national identification was a not a significant predictor of voting behaviour. In conclusion, the present research suggests that the extent to which citizens identify and feel represented by the government should be considered on par with populist attitudes in understanding support for populist parties. Perceiving that the government does not represent everyday people may be sufficient to abandon support for mainstream (non-populist) political parties.
Citation
Urbanska , K , Pehrson , S & Guimond , S 2021 , ' Power to the people : disidentification with the government and support for populism ' , Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology , vol. 5 , no. 2 , pp. 79-89 . https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.77
Publication
Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.77
ISSN
2475-0387
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.77
Description
This work has been supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche grant ANR-16-PILO-0002-06 as a part of FLAG-ERA joint transnational call project, FuturICT 2.0.
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/h7wbc
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/25396

Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

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