Clarifying our Populist Moment: Operational Populism in the American Electorate

• In Event: Public Attitudes toward Populism

Abstract

Observing the rise of President Trump, many scholars have suggested that the United States is experiencing a populist moment. Yet there is widespread disagreement about what populism entails in our present American context. If contemporary populism is an abstract rejection of representative democracy in favor of popular control, then Trump's rise may portend dark times for democracy. However, if the electorate is simply energized by issue concerns common to other populist movements (e.g. immigration, economic nationalism), this is a much different story -- disconcerting, to be sure, but hardly fatal to our democratic edifice. Re-purposing terminology coined by Ellis and Stimson (2012), we hypothesize that mass populism in the United States is far more operational than symbolic. That is, to the extent people vote according to populist impulses, these are operational issue concerns shared with other populist movements rather than a symbolic commitment to populist ideology. Using an original survey index developed for the 2017 CCES (and expanded for the 2018 CCES), we test this hypothesis. Moreover, by including operational concerns relevant to either the Left or Right, we isolate the effects on vote choice of two ideologically distinct, issue-based forms of mass populism.

Authors

• Edward G. Carmines, Indiana University, Bloomington

• Eric R. Schmidt, Indiana University, Bloomington

• Matthew Fowler, University of Chicago