Organizing Belonging in Uncertain Times: Discourse, Citizenship, and Nationalist Group Formation

This paper conceptualizes a discursive–psychological system for analyzing how nationalist populist movements organize political belonging under conditions of heightened uncertainty. Drawing on uncertainty identity theory, the framework begins from the premise that self-uncertainty motivates individuals to seek out highly entitative, normatively prescriptive groups (often marked by rigid boundaries, nationalist ideology, and authoritative leadership) because such groups provide identity stabilization and function as coping mechanisms. The system translates these dynamics into a set of discursive indicators for identifying how political communication constructs certainty-providing collective identities and boundaries of membership. Rather than treating discourse as belief persuasion, the framework examines how political language and symbolic practices signal exclusivity and prescriptiveness, intensify in-group/out-group differentiation, legitimate authority, and recast ambiguity as moral or existential threat. These dynamics are illustrated through two distinct discursive techniques, encompassing participatory epistemic practices that invite followers to actively produce certainty and demographic threat narratives that frame social change (often through the racialization or culturalization of minority groups) as existential replacement. The framework is further situated within a critical theoretical tradition associated with the Frankfurt School. From this perspective, uncertainty is not episodic but structurally produced through unrealized democratic aspirations and the erosion of substantive civic participation. The weakening of meaningful identities of citizenship generates fertile conditions for political movements that promise certainty through exclusion, discipline, and epistemic closure. In doing so, the framework illuminates how authoritarian-populist discourse reshapes the meanings and boundaries of democratic citizenship. By conceptualizing discourse as a mechanism of group selection, the paper offers an analytic system for comparative research on citizenship, democratic erosion, and radicalization.