Abstract
AbstractThis article scrutinizes the relationship between collective nostalgia and populism. Different populist figures utilize nostalgia by referring to their country's ‘good old’ glorious days and exploiting resentment of the elites and establishment. Populists instrumentalize nostalgia in order to create their populist heartland, which is a retrospectively constructed utopia based on an abandoned but undead past. Using two original datasets from Turkey, this study first analyzes whether collective nostalgia characterizes populist attitudes of the electorate. The results illustrate that collective nostalgia has a significantly positive relationship with populist attitudes even after controlling for various independent variables, including religiosity, partisanship, satisfaction with life and Euroscepticism. Secondly, the study tests whether nostalgic messages affect populist attitudes using an online survey experiment. The results indicate that Ottoman nostalgia helps increase populist attitudes. Kemalist nostalgia, however, has a weak direct effect on populist attitudes that disappears after controlling for party preference.
Highlights
There are multiple recent examples of populist leaders’ nostalgic rhetoric
I created ten different models to control for the effect of collective nostalgia with party preferences and satisfaction with life, democracy and economic conditions
The results confirm the first hypothesis – that collective nostalgia positively correlates with populist attitudes in all models
Summary
There are multiple recent examples of populist leaders’ nostalgic rhetoric. Donald Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ invokes the glorious past of the United States and American society, ‘in which there was a clear order, non-whites and women “knew their place,” and white working-class males made a decent living doing an honest day’s work’ (Mudde 2016). The AKP has structured its narrative with slogans like ‘Resurrection once again, rise once again’ (Yeniden diriliş, yeniden yükseliş), which means that the country was glorious and strong in the past and will be so again. Following these examples, this study questions the relationship between nostalgia and populism using both a representative survey and experimental datasets. Populists frequently emphasize that the elites hijacked the people’s will long ago, and they promise to return power to the people According to this logic, back in the good old days corrupt elites were not powerful enough to abuse the authentic people.
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