A cultural theory of support for populism: fatalism and polyrational governance

The resurgence of populist movements since the early 1990s has brought populist leaders to power in numerous democracies, including Hungary, India, Poland, the Philippines, the United States, and Brazil. Despite the rapid expansion of research on populism, scholars still lack a comprehensive framework that explains both the emergence of populist leadership and the social conditions that sustain mass support for it. Existing studies have identified a range of drivers of populist sentiment-including economic inequality, social isolation, institutional distrust, and governance failures-but these factors have rarely been integrated into a unified theoretical explanation. This article argues that anthropologist Mary Douglas’s cultural theory, particularly its concept of fatalism, offers such an integrative perspective. I propose that fatalism captures many of the social and economic conditions associated with support for populist leaders, while cultural theory’s “clumsy solutions” hypothesis helps explain how governance failures can generate these conditions. In this view, populist leadership and its electoral appeal both emerge in social environments characterized by fatalistic dispositions. By linking diverse drivers of populist support to a broader cultural disposition and to patterns of governance failure, Douglas’s cultural theory provides a framework that helps bridge the demand and supply sides of populism and sheds new light on the contemporary rise of populist politics.