They Are All the Same: Populism and Perception of Mainstream Parties

• In Event: Public Attitudes toward Populism

Abstract

Research on populism often relies on the assumption that populist voters view the society as divided into two homogeneous and juxtaposed groups: the "good" people and the "evil" elites. This view is tantamount to a case of group categorization where political elites are the out-group and the people, as well as populist parties, are the in-group. However, although crucial, whether and to what extent this categorical thinking is reflected in the way citizens perceive political parties has not been tested. Are populist voters more likely to perceive mainstream parties as more ideologically similar to one another than they actually are? Building on literature on social categorization, we argue that populist voters perceive mainstream parties as more homogeneous than people who support traditional mainstream parties. We test this proposition using cross-sectional survey data from European democracies. We isolate partisan perceptual bias from populist supporter specific categorization and use expert assessments as additional baseline. Second, we zoom in using a multi-wave Italian representative panel to evaluate whether perceptual homogeneity is a consequence of populist support, or rather, populist party success is partly due to already existing perceptual homogeneity among the electorate.

Authors

• Zoltan Fazekas, Copenhagen Business School

• Frederico Vegetti, University of Mannheim, MZES