Affective Perceptions and Populist Securitization Narratives: A Psychological Approach

In a time in which right-wing populism is gaining increasing support and a prominent role in articulating security issues to the public, it is necessary to disentangle its interconnections with processes of threat construction, security perceptions and citizens' emotionality, which have not been addressed by previous literature but made strikingly evident by recent developments. This project integrates the literature on securitization to the studies on populism in an attempt to unpack the processes characterizing populism's construction of security narratives and the emotional patterns such narratives may generate. Unpacking such processes means unpacking the 'structures' of communication involved in securitization and contributing to explaining how a securitizing move occurs. By investigating directly from the target recipients how the securitizing message is internalized, the research favours an audience-centred perspective, which has been relegated to a passive role and thus inadequately taken into account. I am interested in paying particular analytical attention to the factors that attract audiences to some ideas and discourses over others, in order to potentially single out which populist stimuli may be more powerful for which citizens. The psychological component of the study, with its focus on the cognitive and emotional processes behind security perceptions and internalizations, will not only help with this but might also serve as a key to explain conservative thinking in populist supporters who do not align with conservatism in the ideological spectrum, thus confirming Taber and Young's (2013) preliminary claim that cognitive processes may cause ideology.