BIE_F_07 The Genesis of Populist Dispositions in Youth Milieus

Objective/ Research Questions

The relevance of research targeting the formation of identity and belonging arises from current issues of social cohesion in a heterogeneous German society, in which the stabilization of social cohesion also depends on whether it can be supported and lived with adequate intensity by a new generation. The study will provide data on the dispositions of the target group of the upcoming generation, which will live with democracy and plurality in the near future. The study assumes that practices of discrimination and devaluation have to be constantly legitimized by the subjects and that they gain their meaning only in the interplay with everyday practices and everyday interpretations. The study therefore turns its focus to dispositions and practices of exclusion in specific social contexts. The study is grounded in basic research and is qualitatively based. It will generate explorative findings to answer the question in which world interpretations and structures of meaning discrimination are embedded. It is expected that the interpretations of meaning identified in the interviews will facilitate a typology to assess proximity and distance to populist dispositional patterns. The study is designed as a qualitative preliminary study to a subsequent quantitative study.

Thematic reference to social cohesion

With the rise and consolidation of right-wing populist parties, susceptibility to anti-democratic ideas has successively increased in recent years. Nevertheless, anti-democratic susceptibility is a question less of attitudes and more of deeper dispositions. It involves cognitive patterns and emotional impulses that come together to form constructions of meaning and interpretations of the world. These structures may be inherently contradictory, but they are not arbitrary. They mediate and bundle notions of identity and belonging in which spatial, social, economic, and cultural aspects can be the common point of reference. In the academic and civil society debate, such forms of belonging are understood as a dimension of social cohesion. Belonging together therefore always necessarily includes non-belonging and separation, which at the same time means that belonging together and disintegration are not merely opposites. The fact that this necessarily exclusionary and strongly normative moment is inherent in the cultural dimension of social cohesion also means that there is no undiminished positive reference to social cohesion. Rather, it is necessary to consider what form social cohesion takes in politically and culturally determined spaces as well as what exclusions and inclusions are also produced with it, and how are these socially negotiated. The genesis of such dispositions, which includes both the personality level and a societal-ideological level, is the subject of a wide-ranging debate in various social theories. An openness to anti-democratic attitudes, a tendency to discrimination, and manifestations of group-based misanthropy must therefore be considered multidimensionally. Analysing these topics includes crisis phenomena, the related semantic and symbolic construction, and mental representation at the individual level. The individual level also includes not only how crises and crisis representations shape the everyday life of the subjects but also the interpretations of the world into which they are integrated. Especially for the upcoming generations, this opens up perspectives that target dispositional genesis and that make comprehensible the differences  conditioned by individual and societal determinants and by contextual and compositional aspects of unequal, political-social, and familial socialization.