Psychology devoted significant efforts to study the psychological antecedents, correlates and consequences of ideological and political preferences by focusing, almost exclusively, on the left-right ideological divide. However, the recent rise of populism in Italy as well as in other countries (e.g., Trump election in the USA) requires new insights that cannot be easily extrapolated from previous research. From the psychological point of view, populism is thus a rather new topic of research. Our research project will approach this issue with three main goals in mind. First we want to examine whether different forms of social exclusion (e.g., anomie, ostracism, economic inequality) can affect endorsement of populism. In addition we want to test whether the desire to reacquire control can be a mediator of the influence of exclusion on populistic ideology. Second, building on previous research in political psychology, we want to examine how a variety of dispositions are associated with populism and whether a psychological profile of a person embracing a populistic view can be identified. Third, we want to examine the consequences of endorsing populism on attitudes, evaluations and behaviors pertaining different important issues of political and social life such as immigration, conspiracy beliefs about health and environment, political participation.
To accomplish the planned goals we will adopt a variety of research methodologies, tools and measures. We will recur to experimental research, which will include physiological and implicit measures, in the lab to establish clear casual associations. Moreover, ad-hoc large scale correlational research will be designed and conducted. Lastly, analyses will be performed on representative survey data , such as the American National Elections Studies (ANES) and the European Social Survey (ESS).
This project will contribute to the progress of our knowledge and understanding of political and social events in several ways. In addition, several fields of psychology (social psychology, political psychology, personality psychology, general psychology) could potentially benefit from the studies we planned.
First, it should be noted that previous research on the psychological antecedents, correlates and consequences of ideological and political preferences has focused almost exclusively on the left-right ideological divide. Although we gained solid knowledge in this sense, this research falls short in providing a full understanding of populism and its psychological roots. Thus, we cannot simply extend previous knowledge to the comprehension of this important phenomena. Despite this evident gap, very little psychological research was conducted in this sense and we cannot firmly answer to basic questions such as: is populism psychologically distinguishable from other left or right wing oriented ideologies? What are the psychological factors that can cause endorsement of populism?
These are fundamental questions that need to be addressed by social sciences in general and psychology can and should take a leading role in this sense. In addition, nowadays, this topic of study is timely and urgently needed. Populism is not an inert ideology that mildly affect individuals' preferences on abstract issues. Several areas of social and political life are potentially affected by populism, even those which are not, at first glance, strictly connected with anti-elitism or with the General Will of People such as attitudes toward vaccines or toward immigration, as well as basic conceptions of democracy as historically determined. By examining the psychological roots of the consequences of populism, this project will contribute to better understand why populism can be so pervasive, far-reaching and fascinating for millions of individuals. To do so, and this could be a potentially important contribution of the project, we will focus on a basic motivational imperative that might underlie populistic shifts, that is gaining back control lost in other domains. This compensatory control explanation of populism, if supported empirically, will help to predict under which social and economic conditions populism will be on the rise, why a certain type of communication characterizes populism, why certain economic, political and historical past experiences cannot defuse populistic peaks in politics. For this and other reasons an important part of the project will deal with examining the consequences of populism in a wide array of domains trying to ascertain not only what is affected by populism but also what type of worldview, motivations or value can underlie the effect.
Another potential innovative contribution of the present project resides in the methodology we will use to study this issue. First, previous research was mainly descriptive or correlational. Although these methodologies are appropriate and informative for this topic, virtually no experimental research was conducted with no possibility to draw causal inferences.
The specific know-how of this research team will allow to conduct solid experimental research thus filling this important gap and allowing to empirically answer central questions which may be best examined experimentally. Second, we will use sophisticated measures and tasks to intercept physiological and automatic responses of individuals. If, as we advance, populism is linked to basic human motivations (e.g., avoiding exclusion, gaining back control, reducing uncertainty), then using physiological, and implicit measures to detect slight, inaccessible to awareness, changes in motivational postures and evaluations can potentially be an important advancement for this field of study.