Deprived and Populist, or Populist and Deprived? Revisiting the Role of Perceived Injustice in Relation to Populism

Populism has been explained by economic crises, increased precarity, and inequality. We first revisit the role of perceived injustice, specifically when people feel they do not receive the fair amount of money they are entitled to, in driving populist support, which is well-established in research on perceived relative deprivation and populism. However, we also suggest that the audience of populist politicians is exposed to populist discourses, in which populist actors make disadvantaged social comparisons and issues of injustice salient, thus making people feel unjustly treated. We test both theories with the help of Waves 1 and 3 of the German Social Cohesion Panel (N = 7104) and by employing measures of populist attitudes, voting for the populist right, and voting for the populist left. In addition, one can assume that the relationship between perceived inequality and populist outcomes may depend on factors such as people’s affluence or whether they live in more or less prosperous economic regions. We find a bidirectional relationship between perceptions of relative deprivation and populist attitudes: they reinforce each other, with the association between anti-elitist attitudes at Time 1 and perceived relative deprivation at Time 2 emerging as the strongest. Moreover, voting for the populist right and populist left is associated with higher levels of perceived relative deprivation over time, but we find only very weak evidence for reverse relationships. Remarkably, affluence does not protect people who hold anti-elitist attitudes or vote for the populist right from feeling deprived at a later point in time.