People seek recognition. Pursuing this intangible yet perceptible construct often reserved for those with status has long motivated human behavior, the domain of politics being no exception. With the recent resurgence of populism and its right-wing variant across developed democracies, concepts related to status such as economic insecurity, cultural grievance, and threat garnered significant attention among social scientists for this reason. Does the perception that one has a low subjective status lead to stronger populist and/or populist-right attitudes? And if so, what is the mechanism, and does social media play any role in this relationship between status perceptions and support for populism? Testing for causality and clarifying the mechanism is important because better understanding the surge in political sentiments that pose direct challenges to liberal democracy first requires identifying the cause and mediators.
To address these questions, I first develop a new theory on the way in which low status perceptions result in stronger populist attitudes with social media usage as the key mediator. Then, I propose a randomized survey experiment that induces variation in participants’ perception of their status to test predictions from the theory. This experimental feature overcomes some inherent challenges associated with existing cross-sectional survey data including its limit to providing only correlational evidence and difficulty of gauging the relative importance of economic and cultural/racial factors in driving support for populism.
