Can Human Evolution Help us Understand Support for Populist Movements?
| Author | Osman Sahin,Bogdan Ianosev |
| DOI | 10.1177/2041905820958820 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
26POLITICAL INSIGHT•SEPTEMBER 2020
Democracy is in retreat, not only
in new or fragile democracies
but also in advanced Western
states. Scholars point at
populism and populist leaders as the
culprit for the global decline of democracy.
The argument says that populist leaders
such as Narendra Modi in India, Recep
Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Donald
Trump in the USA, undermine liberal
democracy through their majoritarian
tendencies and disregard for democratic
institutions. Indeed, populist leaders tend
to bypass institutional checks and balances,
enfeeble accountability structures, and seek
to suppress the voice of their opponents as
Can Human Evolution
Help us Understand
Support for Populist
Movements?
Can cognitive and evolutionary anthropology explain why many
voters are turning to right-wing populists? Bogdan Ianosev and
Osman Sahin investigate.
they allege the opponents do not belong
to their imagined ‘homogeneous and
virtuous people’.
Mainstream political science has argued
that populism is a symptom of liberal
democracy’s failures. In the same vein,
some have argued that the collapse of the
ideologies of the left and the right, together
with the diminishing appeal of the traditional
political parties, contributed to the rise of
populist leaders as increasing numbers
of voters felt ‘left behind’. It is under these
© Press Association
Political Insight September 2020 BU.indd 26Political Insight September 2020 BU.indd 2604/08/2020 13:2804/08/2020 13:28
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