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Contemporary global crises and transformations—including climate change, migration, digitalization, pandemics, financial and economic integration, and terrorism—increasingly determine democratic politics and policymaking. We examine how populist attitudes are associated with perceptions of the threats posed by these six global crises and transformations. Using original survey data in India and the United Kingdom alongside secondary data in the United Kingdom, we robustly show that stronger populist attitudes are positively associated with the perception of threat posed by all six crises and transformations—particularly to the economy and national way of life, but also, of theoretical note, to humanitarian concerns. Furthermore, experimentally priming populist individuals on global governance solutions to each transformation has no effect on their perception of threat, suggesting that such threat perceptions are not driven by political concerns but by the societal crises and transformations themselves. Overall, our findings theoretically support the ideational conceptualization of populism as a thin ideology, distinct from nationalism or left-right attitudes, which acts as a broad, if thin, political psychological predisposition. Substantially, we cautiously argue that our findings may give cause for optimism about the potential to rally popular support for global governance solutions to global challenges.

Global transformations provide a categorical framework for capturing synchronous rewriting systems, generalizing cellular automata to dynamical systems over dynamic spaces. Originally developed for addressing deterministic dynamical systems, the presented work raises the question of non-determinism. While a usual approach is to develop a general non-deterministic setting where deterministic systems can be retrieved as a specific case, we show here that by choosing the right parametrization, global transformations can already be used to handle non-determinism. Context-free Lindenmayer systems, already shown to be captured by global transformation in the deterministic case, are used to illustrate the approach. From this concrete example, the formal obstructions are exhibited, leading to a solution involving a 2-categorical monad and its associated Kleisli construction.