Why Populism Attracts

Nationalist and populist movements are on the rise across the globe. Analyses of populism have been traditionally carried out within the realms of sociology and political science. Yet, as a form of social behavior, populism has a strong psychological underpinning. Scholars have provided different explanations to populism, identifying economic difficulties, political resentment, ethnic rivalries, the refugee crisis, and geopolitical tensions as recent drivers of this phenomenon. In this chapter, we build on these findings by identifying common psychological mechanisms that underlie these seemingly disparate conditions, and offer a psychological lens to explain how they make populism appealing. Specifically, we argue that two main motivational forces lend attractiveness to the populist narrative: the need for significance and mattering and the need for cognitive closure. We provide empirical support to our argument by briefly reporting the results of two studies of populism in the U.S. and Italy.