Status and Populism

• In Event: Identity and Partisan Politics in Contemporary India

Abstract

What determines how much hold right wing populism with authoritarian tendencies is able to take in a country? With the help of survey experiments, discourse analysis and using the case of India (and comparing with United States and Brazil), this paper explains how right wing populists use status concerns to replace economic gains, why that works with both low status and high status groups of poor voters, and conditions (including capture of democratic institutions) needed for these strategies to succeed.

Author

• Ritika Goel, University of California, Berkeley