The persuasiveness of populist communication Conceptualizing the effects and political consequences of populist communication from a social identity perspective

This chapter develops a new, comprehensive model of individual-level effects of populist messages that guided the design of the internationally comparative experiment that is further discussed in the following chapters. The model integrates several theories and concepts like social identity theory, blame attribution, stereotyping, and priming to explain effects of specific elements of populist communication on emotions, reality perceptions (threat), attitudes, and behavior. The model also takes into account individual-level predispositions (e.g., relative deprivation) and national-level contextual factors. The chapter then discusses requirements for empirically investigating the relevant individual-level processes explained in the theoretical model.