GENERATIONAL VALUES AND THE RISE OF POPULISM (Review on Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehart. Cultural Backlash. Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press. 2019)

Abstract

The article reviews a widely cited book “Cultural Backlash” by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, focused on the recent rise of populism all over the world. According to the authors, the generation is the strongest predictor of authoritarian-populist values and voting for the ones. They understand populism as a rhetoric style, based on two main features: challenging the established power and proclaiming that people are the only source of legitimate power in a society. Old generational cohorts, tend to have more populist attitudes and vote for populist parties, while young cohorts have more libertarian values and less likely to vote for populists. Majoritarian institutional design, such as indirect presidential elections in the USA or plural electoral system in Great Britain exacerbate the rise of populism in these countries. Other contributors to this trend are so called “silent revolution”, a massive change of cultural and societal environment in many countries (access to higher education, women emancipation, migration, etc.), which old cohorts tend to oppose, and economic crises, which make people feel more vulnerable and provoke even the young cohort to incline to authoritarian-populist values. The book under review is a crucial paper for understanding massive success of populism in different countries for the last twenty years.