Dynamics of moral populism across conflict lines

In recent years populism seems to have transgressed (national) boundaries, reflected in a phenomenon dubbed transnational populism: “a dichotomic discourse in which ‘the transnational people’ are juxtaposed to ‘the elite’ primarily along the lines of a down/up antagonism in which ‘the transnational people’ is discursively constructed as a large powerless group through opposition to ‘the elite’ conceived as a small and illegitimately powerful group” (De Cleen, Moffit, Panayotu & Stavrakakis, 2020, p.153). While transnational populism is in principle about the connection of different people, research conducted thus far has mainly focused on elite manifestations of transnational populism. In this project we shift the focus back to the people and study the role of populist communication in uniting peoples across borders. We argue that the moral aspect in the populist frame – the moral root of the distinction between the nation’s “pure people” and the “corrupt elite” (Mudde, 2004) – is key. This moralization of an issue, or a conflict, cannot only appeal to (Lipsitz 2018) and convince voters and thus have mobilizing effects (Clifford and Jerit 2013; Jung 2020). It can also increase hostility towards others (Clifford 2019; Ryan 2014). The role of morality in populist communication is rarely studied (albeit see Bos & Minihold, 2021), but we argue that it is exactly this aspect of the populist frame that can unite different peoples, thereby constructing a transnational “people-as-underdog” (De Cleen, 2017). With this in mind, this study investigates the power of the moral populist frame in reducing cleavages between citizens. We investigate, in other terms, whether the polarizing effects of traditional conflicts and cleavages (religious, linguistic, regionalist, economic and cultural), which opens up rifts in evaluations between the in- and the out-group, can be reduced via the common support to the transversal “moral” conflict put forward in populist communication. We furthermore expect this to be particularly the case among voters showcasing high levels of populist attitudes (Akkerman et al., 2014; Castanho Silva et al., 2020), particularly susceptible to the moralizing arguments in populist communication. We test this expectation via novel experimental evidence gathered in representative samples of voters in four selected cases, representing as many typical examples of contexts in which “traditional” conflict lines are salient, focusing on Belgium, Spain, Northern Ireland and Switzerland (n = 8000). In each country we field the same experiment, with a diverse sample of respondents on each side of the conflict. The experiment will be a 1x2 between-subjects experiment in which respondents are exposed to elite communication in which the moralization of populism is either present or absent. Dependent variables are (1) salience of the “traditional” conflict line in the country (e.g., linguistic cleavage) and (2) support for people across that conflict line. Populist attitudes will be included as moderators.