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

Author(s) : Christian Staerklé, Eva G. T. Green

Source : https://serval.unil.ch/notice/serval:BIB_8D3CA09F1F4D

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, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK). 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.”