Populism is on the rise across liberal democracies. A core scientific issue is to understand the social psychological underpinnings of this increasing endorsement of the populist thin ideology. This is characterised by two beliefs: 1) that society is divided into a “good people” in-group and a “corrupted élite” out-group, and 2) that politics should be the direct expression of a people’s general will without any institutional mediation (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). Theoretical analyses and empirical studies in political, economic and social sciences have supported the existence of an economic distress pattern associated to populism, in opposition, or in relation, to the cultural backlash pattern. The former is the hypothesis that increasing populism is the consequence of the economic conditions’ deterioration of middle and working classes, while the latter is the idea that increasing in populism is mostly due to sudden structural changes in most societies—progressivism, globalism, increasing migrations.

Efisio Manunta’s work starts from these macro-hypotheses and aims to frame an integrative model in which social psychological threats representing both economic distress (i.e., relative deprivation) and cultural backlash (i.e., anomie) are parallel patterns of populism and related to social identity and motivated identity construction processes (Vignoles, 2011). Several cross-sectional studies have demonstrated the role of various forms of identity threats as predictors of the populist thin ideology (Manunta et al., 2022; Manunta et al., in press) and partial mediators between economic distress and cultural backlash indexes: in particular, the frustration of belonging motive (i.e., feeling of social exclusion) relative to socially relevant identity categories. These findings were confirmed in five large samples from Chile, France, Italy, Romania, and the United Kingdom (Total N = 9105). They showed that the integrative model is equivalent across different national contexts, and encouraged an identity management hypothesis of the populist thin ideology: The adhesion to the populism can be described as a cognitive coping strategy to reduce feelings of identity threat given by negative identity elements (e.g., perception of themselves in terms of disadvantage socioeconomic status). These findings have repercussions on the literature on populism. In fact, the core of the populist thin ideology is the belief of belonging to a pure ingroup (the People) as opposed to a corrupt outgroup (the elite). This corresponds to a change in the dimension in comparison (from prestige-oriented to moral) that should reduce feelings of threat (Manunta & Becker, in press).

Efisio Manunta will discuss these results from a theoretical point of view, relying on findings from the above-mentioned cross-national dataset, and present the design of an experimental study to test whether populist arguments moderate cardiovascular threat responses caused by identity threatening conditions—i.e., cardiovascular reactivity (Derks et al., 2010). This study is an example of an experimental design applied to populism and could highlight the role of populism in alleviating the physiological conditions of identity threat, which are also associated with psychological well-being issues. If the hypotheses were confirmed, it would provide further evidence in favour of the identity management hypothesis.