Anti-establishment versus Authoritarian Populism: Support for Putin in the West

• In Event: Attitudes towards Populism, Democracy, and Autocracy

Abstract

This paper builds on the emerging literature on the demand-side of populism and the variety of attitudes that condition support for authoritarian leadership. In the past few years, scholars have devised numerous measures for examining populist attitudes. We embrace the value and validity of these contributions while further upgrading the “populist attitudes” measurement scale to reflect the fact that authoritarian and left-wing populist leaders and parties propose significantly different platforms. While repudiating elite rule against the “will of the people”, populism on the left denounces the domineering position of large corporations and its impact on the ever-growing societal inequalities. On the other hand, authoritarian populists press for strong immigration and border controls and adopt a divisive and nativist rhetoric. Research measuring populist attitudes fails to discriminate between authoritarian and left-leaning attitudes when discussing support for populism. Our paper fills this void by disaggregating the “populist attitudes” measure into two components: one authoritarian and one anti-establishment.

We employ quantitative analysis of original public opinion data collected from Canada, the United States, Italy and France, (N = 4000). Our survey questions capture the four dimensions of populism: the citizens’ disenchantment with the elites, the will of the people and their capacity to vote on issues directly in referendums, a preference for majority rule at the expense of minority rights, and support for “strongman” politics. Strong leaders are central to populism, but many previous studies measuring populist attitudes have omitted this survey question.

These strongmen and women present themselves as the vox populi, a stalwart of courage and action, swift decisionmakers despite expert advice, or common sense crisis problem-solvers. As such, they are, at times, responsible for spreading disinformation that marshals support for authoritarian populism. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, for instance, treats the rise of progressive values as an urgent policy issue in the effort to save the traditional family structure. She accuses billionaire George Soros of financing global mass immigration and offers herself as a paladin for the Italians. Similarly, Marine Le Pen considers the fight against immigration and the European Union a matter of national survival for France. The same sense of urgency is echoed by Pierre Poilievre in Canada, a country that so far has escaped the populist wave. In the 2022 Conservative leadership race, he pledged to free ordinary Canadians of gatekeepers such as politicians, bureaucrats, or central bankers, and fight Trudeau’s Covid-alibied power seizure and inflationary overspending. In the US, Trump embodies the characteristics of an authoritarianist strongman, the personality cult, the conceited machismo, the war-prone demeanor towards critics and opponents. Hence, our paper evaluates the extent to which support for domestic populist politicians in the West conditions predilections for an actual authoritarian leader – Russia’s Putin.

Another distinguishing feature of authoritarian populism is the strongman’s claim to be the avatar of the clash between the people and outsiders (i.e. immigrants, racialized minorities and dissenters). This perception of being the sole voice for the majority emboldens the authoritarian populist to circumvent and defy constitutional checks and balances. As Norris and Inglehart (2019: 66) correctly note, “the appeal of populism lies in its claim that legitimate democratic authority is thought to be derived from unconstrained majority rule.” Our survey question “The will of the majority must always prevail, even over the rights of minorities” seeks to capture the willingness of employing majority rule against minorities. As such, our paper examines whether authoritarian populists are more likely support Putin’s seizure of Ukrainian territories, an illegal annexation that Putin brands as embodying the will of the Russian people.

Our findings reveal two dimensions of populist attitudes: one, the authoritarian dimension that loads high on the “strongman” variable and reveals a preference for majority decision making, as well as an anti-establishment dimension that celebrates the will of the people and rejects the political establishment. Authoritarian populists in all four countries reveal strong support for Putin, while anti-establishment populists reject the notion of Putinism.

Authors

• Anna Brigevich, Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• Andrea Wagner, MacEwan University