Populism as protest or solution: an exploration of populist applicability-as-appeal amongst rural, white working-class men in West Wales
Populist radical right-wing (PRR) rhetoric has permeated the UK, visibly in Reform UK’s relative success in the 2024 elections, and widespread protests and riots that same summer. I propose to conduct research on PRR support amongst rural, white, working-class men in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. There is a critical lack of research on PRR support as dependent on its utility to resolve grievances, rather than as expression of grievance. I would discern whether support occurs as protest to social change, or conscious adherence to features of PRR rhetoric. This would address the question of why some individuals are drawn to radical politics when many are subject to structural driving factors, and phenomenological draw factors.
Populism itself is a thin-centred ideology – it is concerned with Manichean distinctions between ‘pure people’ and a ‘corrupt elite’, rather than distinct social goals. The features of radical right-wing versions of this ideology are frequently misattributed to populism as a whole – regressivism, traditionalism, xenophobia and anti-globalisation (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2018). The rhetoric utilised by PRR ideologues, political parties, and media, appeal frequently to white working-class men, emphasising subjective factors such as a perceived loss of social position, gender hierarchies, and migration, experienced in changing work realities. There is demonstrable social and economic upheaval in working-class communities, resulting from economic recession, deindustrialisation, and demographic shift.
My ethnographic research will concern rural, white working-class men’s perceptions of the goals of populist, radical right-wing rhetoric in relation to resolving the social and economic upheaval they are experiencing.