Justice for Social Beings: Why Relational Egalitarianism is the Best Liberal Response to Populism

This paper brings together insights from social psychology, the political science literature on populism, and the philosophy of liberal egalitarianism to argue that Elizabeth Anderson’s relational egalitarianism offers liberal democrats a more politically viable framework against populist appeals than purely distributive theories of justice. While the latter focus on equalising or adjusting individuals’ holdings, they often underplay the group-level dynamics of status, standing, and recognition that populists exploit, and that help fuel contemporary crises of trust and representation. By contrast, relational egalitarianism targets oppressive hierarchies and aims to secure relations of equality characterised by equal respect, power, and civic standing, holding greater promise for stabilising liberal democracy under conditions of democratic backsliding and mistrust. I defend this claim in three steps. First, research in social psychology shows that political behaviour is strongly shaped by group identity and concerns about social standing, while political scientists (e.g., Achen and Bartels 2016) have argued that voters often prioritise who represents “people like us” over programmatic commitments. I treat these findings as a challenge for liberal political theory: any plausible liberal response to populism must take seriously how citizens experience membership, respect, and voice. Second, I argue that purely distributive frameworks, whether egalitarian or sufficientarian, struggle to engage these identity-driven considerations. By focusing on individual holdings, they partly overlook the symbolic and relational dimensions that shape citizens’ sense of worth, and so they can misdiagnose populist resentment as a complaint about resources rather than a complaint about standing and political recognition. Third, I show that relational egalitarianism offers a more compelling framework for addressing these legitimacy challenges, because it recognises that many political grievances are relational rather than simply distributive, and it treats equality as a matter of how citizens relate to one another within shared institutions. This alignment is particularly evident in two key respects. First, relational egalitarianism integrates recognition with material concerns by insisting that no cultural, class-based, ethnic, or regional group should be structurally disrespected, marginalised, or dismissed as irrelevant within the public order. This matters for liberal democracy because citizens may feel their identity is publicly devalued even when they are not materially disadvantaged, with predictable consequences for trust and allegiance. Second, relational egalitarianism is explicitly attentive to the “groupish” nature of human psychology. People define themselves to a significant degree through group identities and respond strongly to perceived threats to them, which makes it normatively salient that a theory of justice can speak to intergroup dynamics rather than treating them as incidental. The upshot is that relational egalitarianism can bolster liberal democracy by addressing the social and identity-based grievances that populists harness. Rather than merely redistributing resources, a relational approach counters the populist narrative that certain groups are permanently “looked down upon,” politically unheard, or subject to forms of domination by insulated elites. More generally, the paper’s contribution is to show that integrating social-psychological findings, populism scholarship, and relational egalitarian philosophy yields a more politically realistic liberal response to the populist challenge than conventional distributive theories alone can provide.