Raphaël Girard co-presents paper on populism and public self-trust

On 6 July 2021, Raphaël Girard presented a paper on populism and public self-trust at the 2021 ICON•S Mundo conference organised and hosted by the International Society of Public Law (ICON•S). The paper, co-presented with Dr David Vitale of the University of Warwick School of Law, is entitled ‘The Populist-Public Relationship and the Interaction of Public Trusts’.

Merging scholarship from law, philosophy, psychology and other social sciences, the paper argues that the populist-public relationship reflects an interaction of two principal forms of public trust. The first is the public’s trust in the populist. This trust follows primarily from the populist’s appeals to authenticity, rooted in the public’s perception of similarity to, and identification with, the populist. However, and significantly, this trust arises alongside, and in interaction with, a second form of public trust – the public’s trust in itself (‘public self-trust’). These two trusts, the authors contend, are mutually reinforcing. And the result of the interaction is a positive feedback loop of public trust that helps sustain populism.