Why do many populist movements manage to assemble coalitions of societal groups that cut across ideological&socio-economic divides?

In a Registered Report we argue:
All groups share a feeling of lacking societal recognition but for very different reasons
osf.io/preprints/soca…
It is a curious aspect of today's populism that its ideological core considers society as a homogenous entity but at the same time populist movements are particularly successful in uniting segments of the population that are very different from each other.
Our attempt at explaining this fact builds on the popular thesis that supporters of populist parties feel “left behind”, but we try to put it on more solid conceptual footing.
We propose a more specific, inherently multidimensional conceptualization of feeling “left behind” as the perception of being denied the societal recognition one deserves.
Our synthesis of literature from philosophy, psychology and the social sciences characterizes societal recognition as a fundamental human desire whose thwarting leads to self-defensive reactions with political implications such as populist attitudes.
And because there are many pathways to the perception of lacking recognition, feeling “left behind” may unite different groups who have been characterized as supporters of populism:
people in routine jobs who perceive a lack recognition for the work they do (Sandel, 2021), conservatives who feel alienated by cultural changes in society @PippaN15/Inglehart or those living in “left behind” rural places (Broz, Frieden and Weymouth, 2021; Harteveld et al., 2021)
What I love about this paper:

We tests this proposition of lacking societal recognition as the common cause of populist sentiments in diverse segments of society in a @RegReports format as part of the @gles_data #OpenScience challenge for @PVS_journal
This means that our study underwent the ordinary peer review process - but before data was even available.
It was judged solely on theoretical merits and the appropriateness of the research design --- not whether we generated spectacular, surprising or clean findings.
@gles_data organized all this and released questionnaires for their future surveys on German elections months before the election date.

In a tight and perfectly organized procedure, the editors organized the blind peer review process on the manuscript up to the results section.
Last week, all authors received information on whether their manuscripts were in-principle-accepted and one day later the survey data was released.

The cool thing:
As part of our pre-registration we had pre-coded our analysis scripts using mock data from 2017
Hence, only two months after the election we have a full-blown theory-guided paper including the empirical analysis.
We can already share the stage 1 manuscript and the results that we will be writing up soon.
It turns out that, as expected, lacking societal recognition is a multi-faceted concepts with distinct roots in different segments of the population.
And once, for different reasons, individuals feel being denied the recognition they deserve, this perception gives rise to populist attitudes.
This is the product of a collaboration with @ChristianSchim and @NilsSteiner who I cannot recommend enough if you are looking for co-authors on populists attitudes :)
Addendum:

You prefer biographic novels or documentaries over academic studies?

Inspiration came from this piece of art:

Didier Eribon
Return to Reims

arte.tv/de/videos/0911…

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More from @Kunkakom

24 Nov
Dass #OpenScience einmal im Koalitionsvertrag einer deutschen Bundesregierung stehen würde, hätte ich nicht gedacht.
Ein Vorschlag zur Umsetzung: Wir WissenschaftlerInnen evaluieren den Erfolg all der neuen Ampel-Gesetze mit pre-registered adversarial collaborations. Das heißt...
die Vielfalt und Gegensätzlichkeit an Grundüberzeugungen, die es auch Wissenschaft gibt, produktiv zu nutzen.

Jetzt ist es doch oft so, dass wirtschaftsnahe, gewerkschaftsnahe, verbrauchernahe Institute in ihren Studien oft das herausfinden, was sie schon immer richtig hielten.
Führen 12€ Mindestlohn zu höherer Arbeitslosigkeit?

Diese und andere Fragen können wir untersuchen ohne dass die Ergebnisse von den Interessen und Ansichten der Beteiligten gefärbt sind.
Read 8 tweets
5 May
Is freedom of speech under threat on university campuses?
Excited to announce this project:
➡️Preregistered adversarial collaboration
➡️Skeptics & proponents with diverging perspectives come together to devise a joint research design
Please participate&RT.
doi.org/10.31219/osf.i… Image
This project takes up a study by Revers / Traunmüller based on a survey among students at a German university.
The study claims to have found evidence for widespread support for restricting free speech on campus
link.springer.com/article/10.100…
Twitterverse and printed media discussed the study quite a bit.
Criticism concerned issues of study design and item wording as well as the normative framing of the results.
taz.de/Studie-zu-Canc…
Read 8 tweets
23 Nov 20
What can you do when an experiment yields null results?

I developed a theory to explain why (some) people derive pleasure from political engagement
14 out of 15 predictions failed

▶️A step-wise process to maximize the informational value of null results
doi.org/10.1017/pls.20… Image
The need-based theory of political motivation in a nutshell:

Building on the ‘Pleasure Principle’, I suspect that people will seek behaviors that made them feel good in the past.
Citizens will therefore seek political engagement when it previously made them feel good. Image
To understand what actions provide pleasure, I built on the concept of basic psychological needs.
Differences in intrinsic political motivation are theorized to reflect whether political engagement was previously experienced as satisfying basic psychological needs. Image
Read 11 tweets
17 Oct 20
Fantastic work (@The_JOP) focusing on political representation with value for the entire discipline.
Exemplary of good science, I think.

▶️Multiverse analyses to assess robustness of earlier findings to model specifications
▶️Collaboration between replicator & original authors
After Hansen&Treul reported evidence for a substantive finding in a JOP article, Saraceno reproduced the analysis and found inconsistent evidence for different model specifications.
The journal then invited all three authors to team up and work together to check the robustness. Image
The newly minted team decided that multiple analytical choices are reasonable for six variables, leading in combination to 288 possible models with reasonable analytical specifications. Image
Read 12 tweets
18 Jul 20
WOW 😍
Boba appears a huge leap towards transparent sensitivity analyses in empirical research
▶️easy multiverse analyses
▶️generates code for all reasonable analytical paths
▶️software-independent (R, Python...)
▶️amazing #dataviz
arxiv.org/abs/2007.05551 ImageImage
You will write your syntax and specify where two or more analytical choices are reasonable.
Boba will generate the code for all combinations of reasonable choices for you. ImageImage
Boba is a domain-specific language (and a visual analysis system) so it works software-independent for #Rstats, #Python etc...
Read 7 tweets
31 Mar 20
Regression analysis with observational data remains the primary analytical method in political science.

However, we will never know whether we controlled for all unobserved confounders.

New sensitivity tools help to assess how likely results are robust to missing controls.
The robustness value (@analisereal,@chadhazlett) applies to multivar. regressions: It is the minimum strength of association that unobserved confounding would need to have, both with the treatment and with the outcome, to change the research conclusions.
The robustness value can be calculated with a Shiny Application (carloscinelli.shinyapps.io/robustness_val…) or with the #rstats package sensemakr.
Read 8 tweets

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