Beyond protest and discontent: A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support

Abstract

Studies on populist parties – or ‘supply‐side populism’ more generally – are numerous. Nevertheless, the connection with demand‐side dynamics, and particularly the populist characteristics or tendencies of the electorate, requires more scholarly attention. This article examines in more detail the conditions underlying the support for populist parties, and in particular the role of populist attitudes amongst citizens. It asks two core questions: (1) are populist party supporters characterised by stronger populist attitudes than other party supporters, and (2) to what extent do populist (and other) attitudes contribute to their party preference? The analysis uses fixed effect models and relies on a cross‐sectional research design that uses unique survey data from 2015 and includes nine European countries. The results are threefold. First, in line with single‐country studies, populist attitudes are prominent among supporters of left‐ and right‐wing populist parties in particular. Second, populist attitudes are important predictors of populist party support in addition to left‐wing socioeconomic issue positions for left‐wing populist parties, and authoritarian and anti‐immigration issue positions for right‐wing populist parties. Third, populist attitudes moderate the effect of issue positions on the support for populist parties, particularly for individuals whose positions are further removed from the extreme ends of the economic or cultural policy scale. These findings suggest that strong populist attitudes may encourage some voters to support a populist party whose issue positions are incongruous with their own policy‐related preferences.

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

“…While there are methodological debates on the measurement of populist attitudes (Castanho Silva, Jungkunz, Helbling and Littvay, 2019;Wuttke et al 2020), such batteries can be used as an independent variable in crosscountry research (Wettstein, Schulz, Steenbergen, Schemer, Müller, Wirz and Wirth, 2020). Most prominently, populist attitudes transcend existing political cleavages and predict voting for populist radical left and right parties in many Western democracies (Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018;Wettstein et al 2019).…”

State of the field: How to study populism and adjacent topics? A plea for both more and less focus

“…; Spruyt et al. ; Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel ). In addition to focusing on voting behaviour and public opinion, scholars have also begun to investigate to what extent voting for populists has psychological roots in personality (Bakker et al.…”

“…Hawkins et al (2012) and Akkerman et al (2014) were among the first to demonstrate that populism can also be measured as an attitude among voters. 1 Recent studies have built on these findings and investigated how to validly measure these attitudes (across cases) and how these attitudes affect vote choice Spruyt et al 2016;Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel 2018). In addition to focusing on voting behaviour and public opinion, scholars have also begun to investigate to what extent voting for populists has psychological roots in personality (Bakker et al 2016;Fatke 2019) or emotions (Rico et al 2017).…”

Party choice in Europe: Social cleavages and the rise of populist parties

“…Definitions of populism converge around a small set of characteristics (Moffitt, 2016;Muller, 2016;Mudde, 2007;Norris and Inglehart, 2019;Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018). Populists, first and foremost, are anti-establishment: they are intent on overthrowing a corrupt, insulated, privileged elite.…”