Affective Perceptions and Populist Securitization Narratives: A Psychological Approach

在右翼民粹主义获得越来越多的支持并在向公众阐述安全问题方面发挥突出作用的时候，有必要理清其与威胁构成过程、安全观念和公民情绪的相互联系，以前的文献没有涉及这些问题，但最近的事态发展使其变得非常明显。本项目将安全化文献与民粹主义研究相结合，试图揭示民粹主义构建安全叙事的过程及其可能产生的情感模式。解开这些过程意味着解开证券化中涉及的沟通的“结构”，并有助于解释证券化是如何发生的。通过直接从目标受众那里调查证券化信息是如何内化的，研究倾向于以受众为中心的视角，这一视角一直被降级为被动角色，因此没有得到充分考虑。我感兴趣的是特别关注那些吸引受众接受某些思想和话语的因素，以便潜在地挑出哪些民粹主义刺激可能对哪些公民更强大。这项研究的心理部分，其重点是安全感知和内化背后的认知和情感过程，不仅有助于这一点，而且可能也是解释民粹主义支持者保守思想的关键，他们不与意识形态领域的保守主义保持一致，从而证实了泰伯和杨（2013）的初步主张，即认知过程可能导致意识形态。

In a time in which right-wing populism is gaining increasing support and a prominent role in articulating security issues to the public, it is necessary to disentangle its interconnections with processes of threat construction, security perceptions and citizens' emotionality, which have not been addressed by previous literature but made strikingly evident by recent developments. This project integrates the literature on securitization to the studies on populism in an attempt to unpack the processes characterizing populism's construction of security narratives and the emotional patterns such narratives may generate. Unpacking such processes means unpacking the 'structures' of communication involved in securitization and contributing to explaining how a securitizing move occurs. By investigating directly from the target recipients how the securitizing message is internalized, the research favours an audience-centred perspective, which has been relegated to a passive role and thus inadequately taken into account. I am interested in paying particular analytical attention to the factors that attract audiences to some ideas and discourses over others, in order to potentially single out which populist stimuli may be more powerful for which citizens. The psychological component of the study, with its focus on the cognitive and emotional processes behind security perceptions and internalizations, will not only help with this but might also serve as a key to explain conservative thinking in populist supporters who do not align with conservatism in the ideological spectrum, thus confirming Taber and Young's (2013) preliminary claim that cognitive processes may cause ideology.