Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute identify defining traits of the type of politics leaders like Donald Trump and Giorgia Meloni employ.
By Lila Thulin
Neil Freese/UC Berkeley (Sources: Evan Vucci/AP; Nicolas Economou/AP; Denes Erdos/AP)
January 21, 2025
An Austrian electoral victory by a party with Nazi roots. The “anti-terrorist” prosecution of an Indian writer for decade-old criticisms of the Hindu nationalist governing party. MAGA.
Reading global political headlines over the past decade, Míriam Juan-Torres González and her colleagues at UC Berkeley’s Othering & Belonging Institute (OBI) saw a pattern. Around the world, politicians were fearmongering, scapegoating marginalized groups for a host of societal problems, and chipping away at democratic norms, like persecuting journalists, in the process. Internally, researchers at OBI’s Democracy and Belonging Forum began trying to label this phenomenon so they could understand how such leaders operate and eventually, figure out how to prevent their consolidation of power.
Courtesy of Míriam Juan-Torres González
The pattern coalesced into a hybrid style of politics that they termed “authoritarian populism.” It didn’t fit neatly into pre-existing academic boxes — authoritarian practices were occurring in mostly democratic states, for example — so Juan-Torres set out to outline the strategies and motivations common among this increasingly popular breed of world leaders, who use populist rhetoric while stoking nativism and aggrandizing their own power.
The resulting paper from OBI, published in late 2024, helps define “authoritarian populism” so readers can see it at play on the global stage. It’s important, Juan-Torres said, because “words and ideas have power; they can frame our understanding of what is and what ought to be done.”
In academic literature, Juan-Torres said that pure authoritarianism often refers to a regime type; it describes the way leaders govern. Authoritarians consolidate power so that they, as the executive branch, have sweeping authority. They often suppress political opposition, spread disinformation, fuel political violence and turn historically independent institutions into political actors that will help achieve their agenda. They typically use coercion to achieve these goals rather than by mustering popular support. Often, authoritarians like Vladimir Putin justify their grip on power by fanning the flames of emotionally charged topics and scapegoating marginalized groups. (Russia’s discrimination against the LGBTQ+ community is an example.)
One difference between an authoritarian government and a fascist or totalitarian one, the paper explains, is that an authoritarian government doesn’t require rabid citizen participation — a drastic example would be Hitler Youth programs in Nazi Germany — and instead leaves room for some private life that is not controlled by the government.
The problem with applying the authoritarian label willy-nilly today, Juan-Torres said, is that authoritarian practices like torture or mass surveillance have long happened in states that are otherwise democratic, with relatively free and fair elections. That discrepancy added to the OBI team’s desire to find a new way of describing modern political trends.
Populism, meanwhile, occurs when leaders rhetorically divide the population into two groups: the majority versus the elites. These leaders position themselves the true representatives of the majority group. This anti-establishment “us-versus-them” struggle is at the center of populist rhetoric, the researchers concluded.
(Angelina Katsanis/POLITICO via AP Images)
But most scholars agree that populism doesn’t have a core belief; you find examples of populism in left- and right-wing circles alike. On the left, Spain’s Podemos party and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders are examples, while right-leaning populists like Geert Wilders, the fiercely anti-Islam leader of the Netherlands’ dominant Party for Freedom, rail against elites.
When you combine features of authoritarianism and populism, like mixing primary colors, you get a unique style of politics called authoritarian populism.
Juan-Torres described the authoritarian populist worldview “almost as if it were like binoculars.” Through one lens, she said, there’s the threat of an identity-based outgroup. Through the other, there’s a deep-rooted struggle between the people and elites. The sense of fear and antagonism these lenses promote leads people to accept authoritarian measures to protect themselves and their in-group. “Taking these extreme measures that are anti-democratic [is] justified because of the enormity of the threat,” she explained.
The term “authoritarian populism” was first coined by theorist Stuart Hall in a 1979 paper describing Margaret Thatcher’s fearmongering about crime and aggressive law enforcement policies. OBI researchers said modern authoritarian populist leaders are focused on nativism (preferential treatment toward “native” inhabitants of an area over immigrants) and opposing pluralism (working toward a more cookie-cutter society instead of a multicultural one).
Unlike pure authoritarians like Putin, who maintain close ties with elites and seek to maintain a status quo, authoritarian populists often decry elites and blame them for citizens’ problems. (Behind closed doors, however, they’re known to maintain ties with elites. Juan-Torres pointed out that the recent linkage between tech leaders and MAGA politicians shows how quickly this facade of being “anti-elite” can lift.)
Leaders who typify authoritarian populism, according to the OBI paper, include U.S. President Donald Trump, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, French presidential candidate Marine LePen, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Juan-Torres also outlined some key strategies she sees in authoritarian populists’ actions. One frames the world as a struggle between two groups characterized in a simplistic way. There’d be the virtuous in-group and the outright evil out-group. This out-group would then be scapegoated for societal problems.
Like pure authoritarians, authoritarian populists also stoke moral panics, she said, using the excuse of a perceived existential threat to justify draconian measures. One might spot this tendency in the Trump campaign’s attacks on transgender rights, which depicted a small number of trans athletes as a fundamental threat to societal norms around gender and, instead of leaving space for various types of gender identity and expression, proposed strict government regulation of trans people’s participation in these and other aspects of public life.
“I think authoritarian populists have been really good at providing a lens through which to interpret social and political reality at a time of a lot of uncertainty.”
While authoritarian populists are likely to push the bounds of democratic norms, they also try to preserve at least the appearance of representing the majority of citizens, she said. This might be achieved by contesting elections (think “Stop the Steal”), energizing diehard supporters to vote, or enacting policies that will ultimately disenfranchise people they see as hostile to their cause (for instance, through strict voter ID laws enacted in the wake of the 2020 American election).
Juan-Torres pointed to Italy’s recent criminalization of NGOs that rescue migrants in the Mediterranean as a clear example of authoritarian populism. Another instance comes from the Meloni administration: In 2023, Italy stopped the mayor of Milan from issuing birth certificates that listed two mothers, an administrative move that discriminated against LGBTQ+ couples. This year, her Brothers of Italy party successfully pushed a ban on international surrogacy, another choice that draws from the authoritarian populist playbook of further marginalizing a societal out-group.
Not exactly. While this style of politics is “predominantly found in movements that self-describe as right-wing or alt-right,” said Juan-Torres, they don’t always map neatly onto a simple right-or-left spectrum.
The Dutch Party for Freedom, for example, includes LGBTQ+ citizens (often marginalized by right-wing politicians) as part of the in-group that must be guarded against the perceived threat of Islam. And the anti-migrant party BSW in Germany, which supports expanded social welfare, splintered from the far-left group Die Linke.
The ideological slipperiness of these movements also comes from the fact that they are notably adaptable, Juan-Torres explained. Her paper found “significant ideological flexibility both over time and within movements themselves.” Having ever-evolving central principles can help authoritarian populists build big coalitions.
By understanding how this political style works, Juan-Torres said she hopes citizens can learn how to counteract it.
“I think authoritarian populists have been really good at providing a lens through which to interpret social and political reality at a time of a lot of uncertainty,” she said. They recognize the issues people are facing and give them an explanation and a group to blame.
Other political groups should consider how they can provide a counter-narrative. The big question, she said, is: “How do we provide a space … for grievance and loss, but [that] also is positive about what we can build?”
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Copyright © 2025 UC Regents; all rights reserved
