Analysing Opinions over Time: Do Populist Voters Have Anything in Common at All?

• In Event: Radical-Right and Populist Voting

Abstract

Despite the diffuse scholarly attention for the populist phenomenon, we still know little about the existence (or lack) of common motivations of populist parties’ voters across ideologies (Rooduijn, 2018), or their presence over time. Some scholars theorise that it might be possible to identify “a populist voter”. However, large N studies that tried to identify commonalities of left- and right-wing populist voters shed a light on a more complicated picture. When tested empirically, most of the features that were thought to be common to populist supporters across ideologies show diverse tendencies across countries (e.g. Rooduijn, 2018). It thus seems that beyond sharing the thin populist ideology, voters of populist parties do not have much in common. It must, however, be noted that studies across cases are few, and except for Rooduijn (2018) most of them either focus on few countries (e.g., Pauwels, 2014), or address only one or few dimensions of the populist electoral base (e.g., Krause and Wagner, 2021). Furthermore, they all focus on a single time-point: something that received little, if none, scholarly attention is the presence of a “populist voter” over time, or to use other words, if there was ever a “populist voter”. Thus, this study explores the presence of commonalities in the micro and macro foundations of populist supporters across countries and across time, by using nine waves of ESS data (2002-2018), on seven countries that have had established and successful populist parties for the whole period.

Author

• Elena Baro