And for those who want to learn more about need for chaos: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10....

For those interested, I've written more about Group Relative Deprivation and attitudes toward liberal democracy here: web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/vina...

If I were to speculate, it could be that high inequality coupled with a weak welfare state in the US leads low status individuals who feel screwed over to feel like they have less to lose from burning down the system. I'm not sure, but we will keep digger for answers.

Part of the explanation might be that the GRD question was slightly different. We asked about whether people felt they were losing their deserved place in society, which likely explains the positive correlation for high status individuals, but less so for low status ones.

Intriguingly, the pattern is reversed in Europe. These data come from from France, Germany, and Italy during last year's European elections. Here, GRD is positively correlated with NFC for high status individuals and basically uncorrelated for low status ones.

This pattern might create strange bedfellows in US politics: Those who may worry about losing their high position in league with those who think they don't deserve to be in a low one.

That is, people who think they have low social status are higher in need for chaos if they think their group is being screwed over, while people high in social status are higher in need for chaos if they think that their group gets more than it deserves.

A bit more about the interaction between group relative deprivation and one's perceived social status: In the US data (collected with @rorytruex.bsky.social) shows that GRD is positively correlated with NFC for those with low social status and negatively correlated for those with high status

These findings confirm an explanation of populism offered by @casmudde.bsky.social that it is an illiberal response to the perceived undemocratic liberalism inherent in There Is No Alternative politics.

To explain this, I look to an old social psychological concept called "relative deprivation." Even after controlling for social status and economic well-being, voters who feel that they are doing worse off compared to others are more likely to be populist AND see immigrants as resource competitors.

Even more puzzling: Those who want this form of "populist" representation like democracy in the abstract, but are also just as willing as those who want authoritarian government to trade off democracy for economic growth. Why?

Moreover, the desire for representatives to listen to ordinary people is *uncorrelated* with the desire to have a strong leader empowered to do illiberal things. Populist voters want a paradox: a strong leader who listens to them.

Analyzing survey data the @cevipof.bsky.social collected around the European elections in France, Italy, and Germany, I find that populist voters want representatives who listen to them (as expected) but they are NOT less supportive of compromise or deliberation!

What's more, these results are not moderated by participant's disposition empathy or racial prejudice. As with all null results, perhaps a different photo or different news story would have had effects. But, at a minimum we don't find robust evidence for the thesis that close-in photos humanize.

We measured participants' empathic responses and support for government policies to aid the victims after each article. We basically find no differences across the conditions.

Participants read 2 news stories: one about refugees in a foreign country and one about a flood in the US that displaced people from their homes. We varied the framing of the photos and whether the displaced persons had white or black skin. The control group read the same story w/ no photo.

We tested this hypothesis with a large-sample survey experiment (N=2,550). In addition to testing the framing of the photos, we also studied whether the ingroup or outgroup status of the displaced persons mattered (measured via skin tone) + whether foreign/domestic crises mattered.

Close-in framed photos portray displaced persons as individual human beings, while wide-framed photos portray them as a mass of faceless individuals. Previous research suggests that close-in framed photos increase empathy and support for public assistance to displaced persons.