A Comparative Analysis of Nativist Populist Rhetoric and the Development of a Novel Psychological Intervention Using a Social Identity Approach

Overview

Group identities are an important part of how we view our social world. It can be good to be part of a group, whether a local community or a nation. They can be an important part of how we gain meaning in our lives. However, the value we attach to our group identities means they can also be used for influence by skilled speakers and writers to suit divisive political goals. Through a mixture of language analyses and psychological experiments, this research programme investigated the narratives that populists use to influence public understandings of group identities, and whether these could be challenged.

Initial research from my PhD focused on politicians and News Media, as two of the most prominent sources of populist political narratives, across three liberal democracies (UK,US, and Australia). The results demonstrated how two key identities of ‘the elite’ and ‘immigrants’ could be used to further populist agendas. Notions of ‘the elite’ could be used to depict a range of voices in society as being untrustworthy sources of information. They could include mainstream news sources, universities, schools and even protesting members of the public. Populists could also depict immigration in ways which presented people from elsewhere as having inherently ‘antagonistic’ or ‘alien’ values that meant they would choose to ‘reject’ the national identity. This served to create hostile perceptions towards others within the nation which could be extended across generations.

The research then investigated whether teaching people how their social identities could be used in political rhetoric could challenge negative social attitudes. It emerged that this was effective for challenging populist, but not anti-immigration, attitudes. The proposed fellowship will build on this research:

(1) Deliver impact activities to non-academic audiences to improve the critical evaluation of political claims,

(2) Develop skills in advanced experimental methods,

(3) Produce academic papers,

(4) Increase the academic reach of the findings through presentations and exploring the potential for future research collaboration.

In collaboration with:

              Dr Gulseli Baysu                                      Professor Rhiannon Turner

Progress to date:

• Click here to read the article was published in The Conversation; US election: how populists encourage blind mistrust - and how to push back. 

• Research talks have been given to around 90 students, in 3 secondary schools across Northern Ireland.

• Institutional visits to Toronto Metropolitan and William Laurier Universities in Canada to give presentation - title "Experimental evaluations of an intervention to nativist populist rhetoric using a social identity mobilisation approach" and discuss future research potential. 

• A paper presentation was given at The 18th International Conference on Language and Social Psychology (ICLASP18) in Estonia - title "Analysing nativist populist cultural value rhetoric as an ideological dilemma".

• Paper has been submitted to the Political Psychology Journal (Currently revise and resubmit) - "Attitude change by facilitating choice: Experimentally evaluating a social identity-based intervention to nativist populist rhetoric".