Populists increase political divisions
POLITICAL divisions are deeper than at any time in the past 50 years.
Populist movements such as former US president Donald Trump’s campaign and the Brexit movement have become deeply associated with political identities, leading to greater antagonism by opposing sides, studies led by researchers at St Andrews University have found.
The research – a collaboration between the universities of St Andrews, Princeton and Pennsylvania – used mathematical and computational models to study how political attitudes and identities shifted over time in response to growing inequality.
The findings provide insight into the rise of populist political parties or movements who represent themselves as “against” the elite such as Trump in the US, Le Pen in France, Bolsonaro in Brazil and the Brexit movement in the UK.
Dr Alexander Stewart of St Andrews University, who led the study, said: “To reverse polarisation you must first remove the conditions that helped create it (ie inequality) and then engage in efforts to change attitudes, eg signalling by political elites in the form of bipartisan cooperation or improved rhetoric about the ‘other side’.”