Thesis title: Defending the Ingroup from the Corrupt Elite: Collective Narcissism, Ostracism, and Perceived Injustice as Psychological Pathways to Populism.
Populism, conceptualized as a thin-centered ideology opposing the “pure people” to the “corrupt elite,” (Mudde, 2004), it is often considered for its consequences on the erosion of democratic institutions, like judicial and media freedom, or for higher executive corruption and for its increased political polarization. Studies on the antecedents of populism have considered socio-economic, personality, emotional, and social factors, but have not always found congruent evidence of how they drive people to embrace a populist attitude. Building on this framework, the present contribution explores, in four studies, a possible path of how some psychological antecedents may bring people to embrace a populist attitude.
Inspired by the widespread echo generated by the U.S. Supreme Court overturn of the Roe v. Wade ruling, which de facto limited the right to abortion in the USA, the first study examined whether perceived social discrimination toward a disadvantaged outgroup could elicit populist attitudes. Contrary to our expectation, findings suggested that injustice perceptions may drive populism only when injustice appears to harm the ingroup. Based on these results, the second study exposed participants to two alternative populist communications, respectively depicting migrants and European government elites as a threatening outgroup. The objective was to redefine the boundaries of the in-group to verify whether there were differences in the perception of threat (and therefore on the strategies adopted by people) depending on whether it came from an elite outgroup or an equal outgroup. Results showed that right-wing populist messages (with a non-elite out-group) increased populism through collective narcissism, highlighting the role of group-based resentment. To confirm these conclusions, the third study aimed at testing different possible defensive strategies adopted by people to face threats from an elite out-group. It therefore focused on vertical populism, manipulating perceived immorality of political elites: although immorality and collective narcissism predicted conspiracist beliefs, in this case (with an elite outgroup), they did not directly affect populism. These evidences suggest that the relationship between collective narcissism and populism may not be automatic, but rather contingent on additional social conditions. Finally, the fourth study investigated ostracism as a root of collective narcissism and populism, revealing that social exclusion heightened vulnerability and, in turn, collective narcissism and populism. Interestingly, effects were mitigated when participants could attribute exclusion to potential fraud. Together, these findings suggest that populist attitudes arise as a defensive reaction to perceived social exclusion and group-based threat; however, the mechanisms that lead to higher levels of populism could be more context-dependent and out-group dependent than we thought.