I work in political & social theory on capabilities, power, and ontological security. My current project develops a needs-based account of democratic decline: affluent liberal democracies meet material needs yet erode institutional pathways to esteem and purpose, generating ontological insecurity that populist movements exploit.
Late-modern democracies are stable only when citizens can meet higher-order needs for esteem and purpose through credible institutional paths. I reconstruct Maslow through a Nietzschean account of self-mastery and link this to Giddens’s ontological security to model “human development as institutionalized capability expansion.” The theory explains why unmet esteem/purpose needs produce axiological insecurity—experienced as powerlessness and a vacuum of meaning—that populist actors can mobilize. I apply Needs-Based Discourse Analysis to the United States (2015–2025) and United Kingdom (2016–2025), coding speeches, campaign ads, and elite media to show how appeals to belonging, esteem, and purpose structure contemporary rhetoric. The project provides a psychologically grounded micro-foundation for democratic fragility and informs reforms that rebuild ontological security.
Key questions
Approach & methods
Conceptual reconstruction (Maslow; Nietzsche; Arendt; Giddens); qualitative Needs-Based Discourse Analysis with a coding frame for belonging/esteem/purpose; comparative case logic (US/UK) with cross-media triangulation (speeches, ads, editorials).
Outputs: theory article, coding frame note, two case studies.
Selected references (short list)
Maslow (1943); Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (1991); Sen, Development as Freedom (1999); Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (1991); Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (2018); Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941).