A safety net against populism? An investigation of the interaction effect of political efficacy and democratic capacities on populist attitudes

ABSTRACT

The paper interprets populism as a symptom of a mismatch between how the democratic polity operates and how citizens conceive their own aspirations, needs and identities vis-à-vis the polity. However, democracy requests certain attitudes and skills from citizens: political engagement, a reflective attitude, scrutiny of the power holders and balancing trust-based cooperation with critical reactions towards political authorities. In line with this, we investigate how external and internal political efficacy are associated with populist attitudes in the case of people who have and who do not have certain democratic capacities. Our findings drawing upon an original survey covering 15 European countries show that higher internal political efficacy is associated with more populist attitudes in the case of people with incomplete democratic capacities, but complete democratic capacities yield a ‘safety net’ against this effect. However, the negative relationship between external political efficacy and populist attitudes does not depend on these capacities: stronger dissatisfaction with the responsiveness of political elites leads to more populist attitudes irrespective of people’s democratic background. Nonetheless, our findings imply that a stronger emphasis on certain democratic practices and values in political socialization or civic education could prevent stronger political confidence would turn into populist views about politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• populist attitudes
• political efficacy
• democratic capacities
• cross-country survey

Acknowledgments

Any dissemination of results here presented reflects only the author’s view. The Agency is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The following section is based on Bene and Boda (2021).

2 DEMOS – Democratic efficacy and the varieties of populism in Europe was an EU H2020 project, see https://demos-h2020.eu/en. We would like to thank David Abadi and Agenta Fischer from the University of Amsterdam for administrating the survey and finalizing the dataset.

3 See Table A1 in Appendix for the operationalization and descriptives of all variables.

4 People-centrism: (1) „Politicians should always listen closely tot he problems of people'; (2) „The will of people should be the highest principle of a country’s politics. Anti-elitism: (3) „The government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking out for themselves'; (4) ‘Quite a few of the people running the government are crooked'. Manichaen outlook: (5) ‘You can tell of a person is good or bad if you know their political views'; (6) ‘The people I disagree with politically are just misinformed'.

5 ‘I think it is important that every person in the world be treated equally.'

6 ‘It is important to listen to people who are different from me even if I disagree with their views.'

7 ‘It is important to me that I am free to make my own decisions, independently of others.'

8 ‘Being [my nationality] is an important part of who I am.'

9 ‘I am anxious about what the future will bring.'

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme: [Grant Number 822590]; Bolyai János Postdoctoral Fellowship: [Grant Number BO/334_20].