From emancipation to authoritarianism: the theory of postmaterialism and “cultural backlash”Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism is the latest book by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart. The work seeks to analyze recent changes in more consolidated democracies, anchored in the theoretical model originally formulated in post materialism. In this review, we seek to summarize and explain how the authors operationalize the concepts of populism, authoritarianism and cultural reaction. We conclude that the Norris/Inglehart model was too optimistic and failed to anticipate factors such as a decline in trust in democratic institutions and the negativity in the evaluations of politicians who gained strength in recent years. We also found that the analyzed work provides an original theoretical framework for understanding the emergence of authoritarian populism in the countries studied.
Keywords
cultural backlash; post-materialism; democracy; populism; authoritarianism