Do Populist Citizens Support Democracy?

• In Event: Populist Attitudes in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

In the last few years, a growing number of scholars have been measuring the demand for populism; that is, there are an increasing number of studies that use surveys to assess the extent to which citizens share populist attitudes. Previous research has shown that populist ideas are not only widespread across the population, but also that they relate to support for democracy and democratic dissatisfaction. More specifically, a recent study argues that populist citizens could be seen as “dissatisfied democrats”: voters who are in favor of democracy as a regime, but who are disappointed with the way in which democracy is working. Although initial empirical evidence tends to support this argument, the question remains why exactly we notice this incongruence between normative and empirical opinions of democracy. After all, by looking at support for democracy and democratic dissatisfaction – the two classic indicators to examine so-called “dissatisfied democrats” – we remain puzzled about how voters interpret the concept of democracy. Given that populism is a set of ideas that not only portrays society as divided between “the corrupt elite” and “the pure people” but also defends popular sovereignty at any cost, it is not unreasonable to expect that populist citizens interpret and observe democracy differently than the traditional liberal democratic principles that define contemporary democracies. To empirically test this idea, we use new cross-national survey data for twelve European countries that permits us to empirically analyze the link between populist attitudes and different conceptions of democracy (e.g. direct democracy, electoral democracy, liberal democracy, social democracy, etc.). If it were true that citizens who sympathize with populism tend to prefer a model of democracy that diverges from liberal democracy, this suggests that the prerequisites for the proper functioning of liberal democracy are challenged in important segments of the electorate.

Authors

• Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Universidad Diego Portales

• Steven Van Hauwaert