The Populist Playbook: Why Identity Trumps Policy and How Democrats Can Adapt

Despite occasional setbacks, populism remains a formidable force in global politics, with strong chances of reaching new heights in a historically unprecedented wave.

Yet, there is a critical paradox: populist leaders continue to secure electoral victories despite their poor performance when in office, which often yields mediocre economic outcomes and weakened democratic institutions. For example, in 2023 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey won re-election amidst severe economic challenges (including an inflation rate that had exceeded 80 per cent). Others like Narendra Modi in India, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have significantly weakened the mechanisms that allow citizens to hold them accountable, but have held on to solid majorities to keep governing.

The puzzle extends to specific voter demographics. In the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump boasted of grabbing women ‘by the pussy.’ He nonetheless won 52 per cent of white women's votes. Similarly, despite calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists’ in 2016, he went on to receive 28 per cent of the Latino vote.

The conventional interest-driven paradigm of voting—which continues to dominate political debate—is of little help in dealing with this puzzle, but a social identity perspective offers a more compelling framework.

The standard model and its limitations

The standard model of voting behaviour assumes that voters act rationally to maximise their utility by selecting the candidate who best fit their policy preferences and offers them the most pecuniary benefits. Populists—like all politicians—must appeal to voter concerns. However, delivering concrete benefits to voters is neither a strictly necessary nor a sufficient condition for electoral success.

Take the case of Joe Biden. The US was among the best performers among advanced economies. In the last two years before the 2024 presidential elections, unemployment hovered at record low levels. More recently, inflation came down to 3 per cent from a peak of 9 per cent. And yet Biden lost. The standard model struggles to explain his defeat.

Because voters lack information about which policies will effectively achieve their goals, and find it difficult to trust politicians, they often rely more on emotion and personal trust than on detailed policy proposals. Trust is often a crucial factor in voter decision-making.

Over millennia, humans developed a preference for belonging to a group and following its rules and rituals. As a result, humans often identify strongly with in-groups and tend to trust their members, while viewing members of other groups—the out-groups—as threatening and untrustworthy until proven otherwise. That is why identitarian appeals are powerful tools to establish trust and rapport.

In contrast to liberal democrats, populists are very good at playing identity politics and manipulating people's ‘groupish’ tendencies. From Brexiteers and Catalan separatists to Islamic fundamentalists, populist politics always pits ‘us’ against ‘them’.

Voters initially choose to support politicians because they identify with them, whether because they look and sound like them or because they reflect their social attachments, hopes and fears. Policy preferences come later, once people are comfortably aligned.

Furthermore, expressing and protecting peoples’ identities is a crucial component of their welfare—and this consideration may well trump material interests. ‘Oversimplified views of rational choice theory are behind many of the claims that the Trump voters were irrational’, writes Keith Stanovich. For instance, ‘a common complaint about them among Democratic critics is that they were voting against their own interests.’ That is the wrong interpretation, Stanovich argues. Trump voters gain a sense of pride and self-reliance by opposing coastal elites, even if it results in lower welfare spending.

Despite this, much of the mainstream discussion still assumes that good policies and strong economic results will alone defeat populists. This is a mistake, which matters for the conduct of daily politics and the fight against authoritarian populists.

Re-imagined communities

What is the alternative? An obvious starting point is not to ignore or dismiss identity politics, but instead to create more inclusive identities. Democrats need to create alternative frames and narratives that make these inclusive identities plausible and attractive.

Appealing to people's patriotism is a natural alternative to divisive ‘us versus them’ identities. In contrast to exclusionary nationalism, liberal patriotism can be domestically inclusive and externally peaceful. The nation should not be defined in terms of ethnicity, religion or any comprehensive set of values about the good life. A liberal patriotic identity must be a wide but ‘thin’ identity, compatible with a diverse and pluralistic society.

A second key point is that liberal patriotism should rests on a shared set of public values and symbols. Jurgen Habermas's constitutional patriotism could be one version of this value-based identity.

A third point is that the civic bases of patriotism need to be supplemented, non-officially and non-coercively, by a celebration of personal experiences and interactions. Call it ‘cultural patriotism.’ As George Orwell said about England:

Making inclusive patriotism plausible

Excessive inequalities erode the strong sense of ‘us’, which in turn makes it harder to garner the collective solidarity needed to stop or reverse widening inequalities. It is hard to imagine the creation of the Nordic welfare states or the NHS in Britain after World War Two without a powerful underlying national sense of ‘us’.

What sort of political narrative could support inclusive patriotism? Elizabeth Anderson has argued that democratic societies should be ultimately concerned with achieving not distributive equality, but relational equality: a situation where no individual or group is dominated by others in the private sphere and where everyone can stand as a ‘full equal’ in the public sphere.

This egalitarian narrative must be borne out in actions to be credible. This means policy-making also needs to be viewed through an identity lens: it is not just about who gets what, but about who is treated in certain ways, about which groups feel valued and which groups feel dismissed as unimportant.

A successful counter-narrative to populism will also require a revamp in liberals’ choice of candidates. All too often, liberal parties have chosen candidates who may be highly qualified, but appear elitist and aloof. Liberal leaders need to be perceived as culturally and emotionally close enough to inspire trust. Otherwise they will continue losing the struggle against authoritarian populists.