Abigail Luke
The political campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016 reflected the growing prominence of populism both in the United States and globally. This thesis seeks to explain a common psychological mechanism hypothesized to underlie populist vote choice: political non-conformity. The present study finds that populist voters are less conformist. This study also finds compelling evidence of psychological differences among populist candidate supporters and lays the foundation for future research in political non-conformity.