Neoliberal Moral Frames and Asymmetrical Nationalist Legitimation: A Case Study of British Citizens’ Beliefs in Legitimacy

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Abstract

The logic behind recent right-wing populist movements presents an empirical puzzle: how can politicians, parties, and voters be simultaneously pro-market and secessionist? To begin to address this puzzle, we examine the intersection of nationalism and neoliberalism in British citizens’ reasoning about political legitimacy. Our investigation focuses on if and how neoliberal frames of market fairness establish a “moral economy”—or popular consensus of market fairness—that leads different socio-economic groups with seemingly opposing interests to make analogous legitimacy evaluations concerning British nationalism. Centrally, we examine if this moral economy is used to create “asymmetrical” evaluations of political legitimacy, in which citizens use the same neoliberal fairness criteria to evaluate British national political institutions as legitimate and European Union institutions as illegitimate. Furthermore, we argue that this relationship needs to be seen as a “democratic linkage”—or relationship between citizens and the broader political system. While previous analyses investigate nationalism or neoliberalism as citizens’ relationship to one aspect of a given political institution or system, this “democratic linkages” framework enables us to account for asymmetrical national and supranational legitimacy evaluations. We proceed by providing a qualitative analysis of the CITAE UK focus group data from the mid-2000s. This analysis is important because it could potentially shed light on the reasoning that citizens used when voting on Brexit—as well as the broader empirical puzzle of the intersection of neoliberalism and nationalism in popular political discourse—ultimately contributing to future analyses of right-wing populist moral boundaries and evaluative norms.

Authors

• Luis Antonio Vila-Henninger, Université catholique de Louvain

• Virginie Van Ingelgom, Université catholique de Louvain

• Mauro Caprioli, Université catholique de Louvain