Grievance politics has emerged as an analytically distinct form of political representation that is designed and intended to challenge and disrupt traditional party politics. As Table 1 illustrates, Mode II’s mechanism of representation is simpler than that of Mode I. It merely consists of the transformation of citizens’ (unaddressed) preferences into grievances and blame, and often involves the explicit criticism of Mode I institutions and processes. Grievance politics interprets the existence of political apathy or frustration vis-à-vis traditional politics as a potential political resource and therefore seeks to exploit and exaggerate the existence of social grievances with party politics. Its “anti-political” emphasis is therefore not “anti-politics” per se but is more accurately represented as being against or “anti” how party politics has evolved. The main agents of representation in Mode II are not political parties but individual politicians, which in the literature have varyingly been called (authoritarian) populists, mavericks, anti-establishment figures, or celebrity politicians (see also Barr 2009). Understanding Mode II’s mechanics of representation therefore requires us to focus on a different unit of analysis. We distinguish between three overarching strategies of representation employed by grievance politicians. All of them are primarily rhetorical strategies transported through classic media (mainly TV, but also newspapers) and social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.): (i) fueling grievances, (ii) generating blame, and (iii) seeking blame.
In relation to fueling grievances, research in political psychology suggests that governments’ failure to address societal problems such as rising levels of economic inequality creates negative emotions like anger, fear, stress, or uncertainty among citizens. Citizens living in unequal societies, for example, “are significantly more likely to regularly experience negative, sanctioning moral emotions” (Hitlin and Harkness 2018; see also Wilkinson and Pickett 2010; Case and Deaton 2020). By fueling grievances, politicians can tap into these negative emotions, the logic being that appeals to unaddressed preferences activate (negative) emotions which in turn trigger (negative) political judgements (Brader 2005; Marcus 2000). Politicians can fuel grievances in at least three ways.
First, they can do so by creating chaos and confusion. As the Washington Post’s (2020) Donald Trump and his Assault on Truth illustrates in forensic detail, grievance politicians such as Trump have been shown to spread lies, fake news, conspiracies, disinformation, and misinformation (see also Bennett and Livingston 2018; Lazer et al. 2018). Peter Oborne’s (2021) The Assault on Truth explains how by creating chaos and confusion, grievance politicians not only reinforce negative emotions such as uncertainty or fear but also, and paradoxically, can gain authenticity. Lying, for example, is generally considered a flagrant violation of the norm of truth-telling. And yet in times of crisis, citizens tend to see norm violators as authentic champions of their preferences, who “can be perceived as bravely speaking a deep and otherwise suppressed truth” (Hahl et al. 2018, p. 3). This flows into a second way of fueling grievances—fearmongering. Grievance politicians can stir panic and fear in a wide variety of ways, which range from anti-immigrant claims (e.g., migrants destroying “our” culture) to election-fraud claims (e.g., “stop the steal”) to invoking threats of a financial panic or inflation (e.g., “you will lose what you have”). Fear appeals have two advantages for grievance politicians. First, as Brader (2005) notes, “[f]ear appeals – featuring content and imagery associated with threat – should motivate a search for information, decrease the salience of prior beliefs, and encourage reconsideration of choices on the basis of contemporary evaluations.” Moreover, threats are “experienced largely through affective channels rather than through explicit cognitive perceptions” (Marcus 2000, p. 232). Fear appeals thus help politicians to detach citizens from previous political and partisan allegiances and make them more vulnerable to the spread of chaos and confusion (see above). Fear appeals create a sense of vulnerability among people by emphasizing their “downward mobility” in society while simultaneously removing their own responsibility for it. As Lamont et al. (2017) observe, Trump “removed blame for [citizens’] downward mobility by pointing to globalization as a structural force.” Fear appeals can therefore offer a powerful counter-message to the “ABC model,” reframing what had been seen as private issues of individual choice as public concerns demanding collective responses.
Finally, politicians can fuel grievances by accentuating tribal identities. Research in political psychology suggests that people are group animals, and that this affects their (political) perceptions (Clark et al. 2019). Social identities and group attachments therefore figure crucially in peoples’ political perceptions and behavior (Achen and Bartels 2017; Cramer 2016). However, strong social boundaries do not necessarily coincide with negative feelings towards other groups but may simply be the result of strong in-group identification. This changes when grievance politicians manage to connect grievances perceived by some in-group to purported actions by some out-group (Leonardelli and Brewer 2001). Nationalist, nativist, sectarian, racialized, or welfare chauvinist claims, playing on resentments, or stirring social envy, therefore encourage citizens to think in “us-vs-them” terms. People who think in “us-vs-them” terms make their in-group feelings salient and simultaneously develop negative feelings and emotions for the out-group (Iyengar et al. 2012). Put differently, the accentuation of tribal identities through grievance tactics makes people engage in “negative boundary work,” i.e., they increasingly define and compare themselves to other social groups and are more aware of their own group’s maltreatment by others or its “rightful place in the national pecking order” (Lamont et al. 2017; Leonardelli and Brewer 2001). Donald Trump, for example, returned the white working class to prominence in American politics by addressing and portraying it as a “new minority” which had been ignored and silenced in national politics for decades (Gest 2016).
Political and social psychology research also suggests that various forms of fueling grievances are more successful if employed in combination rather than in isolation. Grievance politicians who convince people to be the members of a single, tightly delimited group or tribe lower their “social identity complexity,” i.e., their awareness of being members of multiple social groups. Low social identity complexity, in turn, is conducive to the development of prejudices towards others, and is likely to be present in situations where individuals exhibit a high need for certainty and stress reduction because of perceived threats (Brewer and Pierce 2005), situations that grievance politicians help create through fearmongering and the creation of chaos and confusion (see above). Overall, fueling grievances leads to abundant negative emotions among citizens.
This leads us into a second major dimension of grievance politics and to a focus on generating blame. Through the generation of blame, grievance politicians give citizens a target for their negative emotions. As Weaver (2018) argues, blame generation (or negative messaging) allows politicians to take advantage of the public’s loss aversion and tendency to privilege negative information. Mistrust of government in particular “provides fertile ground for more negative messages to be viewed as credible, and therefore be effective” (Weaver 2018, p. 275). Grievance politicians can direct blame at specific political rivals, or engage in a more populist variety of blame generation by blaming the political system, elites, the “deep state,” or the “D.C. swamp” (Moffitt 2016; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018). By generating blame, grievance politicians convey the clear message that Mode I and its weaknesses are responsible for public grievances.
There is, however, a third blame-related dimension of grievance politics which serves to further illustrate the emergence of a distinctive mode of representative politics. Instead of routinely avoiding and deflecting blame like their conventional counterparts (Hinterleitner 2020), grievance politicians sometimes deliberately set out to be blamed. Breaking the rules, being provocative, rejecting etiquette, displaying bad manners, telling inappropriate jokes, repeating inaccurate statements, or threatening to break the law or constitutional conventions—“with ‘the middle finger’ defiantly raised” as Pierre Ostiguy (2017, 84) puts it, “to the well brought up, the proper, the accepted truths and ways associated with diverse world elites”—becomes a performative strategy for demonstrating difference and claiming authenticity. For example, throughout his initial campaign for the presidency and his time in office, Donald Trump repeatedly offended through the use of negative labels (e.g., “Crooked Hilary”) and through the outright denial of well-established facts and scientific consensus (e.g., unsubstantiated claims about COVID-19 cures). Boris Johnson is likewise known for a rather unconventional style which involved offending foreign dignitaries, a scruffy appearance, turning-up late, cronyism, the promotion of false statistics, and an inability to resist the temptation to make intemperate comments or jokes. By triggering retaliatory actions by established actors, “blame-seeking” becomes a method of almost trapping conventional politicians to demonstrate their allegiance to a model of politics that large sections of the public have lost faith with (Flinders, Hinterleitner, and Weaver, forthcoming). Moreover, blame-seeking provides grievance politicians with an opportunity to connect with those who feel “left behind” (Wuthnow 2019) or “strangers in their own land” (Hochschild 2016) as it triggers exactly those reactions by established actors that are widely associated with “distant” and “self-serving” elites.
Fueling grievances, blame-generating, and blame-seeking are strategies of representation that translate public preferences (or more specifically, concerns and anxieties) into negative and targeted emotions. Unlike political parties in Mode I, grievance politicians arguably offer a largely symbolic representation to citizens but tend to have very little interest or experience in policy delivery or the machinery of government. In fact, it is an important characteristic of grievance politicians that they do not have strong policy orientations. For example, observers have described Donald Trump and his administration as “post-policy,” i.e., devoid of a concrete governing agenda. Boris Johnson—as several biographers have noted—adopts a highly protean approach to policy. While grievance politicians routinely take positions on policy issues, they also frequently change them, are not particularly interested in their realization, and primarily use them to communicate values (Benen 2020). A paradoxical side effect of this post-policy orientation is that grievance politicians often leave their predecessors’ policies untouched. Donald Trump’s domestic policies, focusing on tax cuts and deregulation, did not significantly diverge from those of previous Republican presidents. Boris Johnson’s policies, too, are broadly in line with his Conservative predecessors.
As an ideal type, grievance politics is fundamentally different from traditional party politics as a mode of representative politics. Its foundational essence is negative, and it embraces a “divide-and-rule” logic which polarizes opinion and inflames fears. Grievance politics reduces the role of party platforms and increases the role of individual profiles; and it also highlights the changing emotional context within which political competition takes place. The relationship between the governors and the governed is recalibrated towards an emphasis on spectatorship and possibly even celebrity. This creates a clear link to the contemporary emergence of populism but a focus on grievance politics embraces a much wider range of variables and trends. Unlike populism, grievance politics does not constitute an unmediated form of rule (Caramani 2017). Instead, it is characterized by a new form of “mediators.” While these mediators may adopt a populist style (Moffitt 2016) to direct blame at Mode I, they also employ a host of other political strategies to fuel and funnel public grievances. Some of these strategies even run contrary to conventional populist claims. While populist claims are based on the distinction between a corrupt elite and a popular majority (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2018), the accentuation of tribal identities often portrays a particular group as a disregarded and mistreated minority. Mode II is thus not simply the populist corruption of Mode I, but a deeper and wider socio-political construct than populism. In fact, scholars who equate grievance politics with populism are unlikely to capture the interrelations and interactions that exist between populist claims on the one hand, and the many blame-based and emotion-related strategies that define grievance politics on the other. But considering grievance politics as a distinct form of political representation not only allows us to comprehensively capture how the actions of politicians such as Trump or Johnson transform democracies; a distinctive focus on grievance politics also provides us, we suggest, with a clearer idea of how representative democracy can be expected to change over time.