What trends might shape the evolution of populism, and what does this mean for international civil society?

Guest blog by Kelly Beaver, Managing Director of Public Affairs, Ipsos MORI

Populism is a strategy employed by political entrepreneurs to gain power and control. By exploiting a widespread sense of insecurity and fear among the public, they take advantage of underlying public favour for extra-institutional measures to “fix” a broken system. Populism capitalises on perceptions that the system is broken – a classic “us vs. them” discourse; liberal institutions must be changed or eliminated, and social or economic conditions that make disruption possible.

In 2019, Ipsos conducted a global study to ascertain the extent to which populist and nativist sentiments were prevalent. We surveyed over 18,000 people across 27 countries. The findings were stark and similar to those revealed when the same questions were asked in 2016. The average global citizen feels left out of the ‘normal order of life’ in his or her country; 70% believe that the economy is rigged to favour the rich and powerful, 66% agree that traditional politics ignore people like me, and over half (54%) believe that their respective country’s society is broken. Effectively the average global citizen wants more hands-on leadership and is ambivalent about immigration, leaning toward a natives-first view. Disaffection is most widespread in Latin America and Eastern Europe.

Key drivers of populist episodes today include:

• A common feeling that institutions are unresponsive to or detached from one’s needs, values, and priorities
• In many although certainly not all countries, a perception that immigration has weakened social order, national cohesion or economic opportunities for the native-born. This often manifests in the perception of a wide economic or cultural gap between immigrants and native-born citizens.

The sustained populist sentiment we are currently experiencing, and the sense that society and institutions do not work in the best interests of ‘people like me’, creates the backdrop within which CSOs are operating. CSOs need public trust when communicating narratives to enable them to garner support for collective action for social causes. This is challenged when, in the eyes of the public, CSOs are grouped together with ‘the institutional establishment’. Whilst there is no single or global crisis of trust as if often mooted at Davos, it is fair to say that government in particular has seen a slow yet steady decline in trust over time.

As discussed in Ipsos MORI’s recent Trust: The Truth report, Trust is multi-faceted – there is no one-size-fits-all way of achieving it.  We tested eight drivers of trust based on Petitt’s theory of trust; all demonstrated statistically significant correlations with trustworthiness, degrees of correlation varied by organisation type.

• Basic trust
  1. It is reliable/keeps its promises
  2. It is good at what it does
• Active trust
  3. It behaves responsibly
  4. It is open and transparent about what it does
  5. It is well led
• Interactive trust
  6. It does what it does with the best of intentions
  7. It shares my values
  8. It would try to take advantage of me if it could

Organisations, including CSOs, must build public trust through a relationship founded on active and interactive trust. This type of trust goes far beyond basic trust – that is to say, the idea that the CSO is competent and reliable. The ICSC report contains many examples of CSOs building relationships of interactive trust with their communities – such as Resilient Roots or Femplatz or Video Volunteers. Once obtained, it is likely to be one of the best defences against populist attack.

The spread of populism is often believed to be fed through misinformation and fake news, exacerbated by one’s own filter bubbles. The Perils of Perception – a major global Ipsos study in 2018, and part of an established series on misperceptions of key social realities – highlights how people often put the blame for misperceptions of others on issues like immigration or crime rates on politicians, and closely followed by the media misleading us. However, 43% also see it as partly down to our own biases, like our focus on negative information, misleading us. As artificial intelligence becomes more for the masses, not just the elite few, and narratives driven through mediums like DeepFakes become harder and harder to identify, we may find that populist narratives can spread more quickly and with greater perceived legitimacy. But we should also note that trust in online media (social and digital) has declined over the last decade; this trend may also continue giving rise to increasingly informed consumers who are more likely to question what they see and hear online.

In summary, populism doesn’t look set to decline any time soon, but the same may not be true of how it manifests and the tools at its disposal. If CSOs want to survive in a populist era, a focus on building public trust, alongside working to enhance the public’s ability to question and identify fake news, will be vital.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kelly Beaver is Managing Director of Public Affairs at Ipsos MORI, and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College, University of London, UK. At Ipsos Mori, Kelly manages a team of over 200 social research and evaluation professionals providing robust research and analysis across every area of government policy.

Kelly joined Ipsos MORI in 2011 following on from her roles at PwC within the Research, Strategy and Policy Group and The Evaluation Partnership (subsequently Coffey International Development). Kelly has directed multidisciplinary teams in advising local, regional, national and international government bodies and agencies on policy design, implementation and reviews.