Informed, uninformed or misinformed? A cross-national analysis of populist party supporters across European democracies

Abstract

Recent research suggests that populist party supporters are not necessarily unsophisticated protest voters. This leads us to question the still popular assumption that these individuals are politically uninformed. Simultaneously, given the current political and media climate and debates about ‘fake news’, this article asks to what extent misinformation, i.e. the possession of erroneous political information, stimulates populist party support. Survey data from nine European democracies are used to assess to what extent populist party supporters differ from abstainers and non-populist party supporters in terms of their political information and misinformation. It is found that holding correct political information relates positively to the likelihood of turning out, whether it is to support populist or non-populist parties. It is further found that political misinformation relates positively to support for right-wing populist parties. The findings provide a first empirical and comparative contribution to recent debates that seek to connect misinformation and political behaviour.

Keywords:

• Populism
• populist parties
• information
• misinformation
• voting behaviour

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the journal editors and the anonymous referees for their extensive feedback and detailed suggestions throughout the review process. We have previously also received valuable feedback from various other colleagues, including Ryan Carlin, Roberto Stefan Foa, Kirk Hawkins, Levi Littvay, Nicole Loew, Julien Navarro, Carolina Plescia, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, and Desirée Schmuck. All these people contributed to improving the quality of this article, and we take responsibility for remaining flaws. This article is supported by Team Populism. More information about the work of this scholarly network can be found online at: https://populism.byu.edu.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The ‘Leave’ side, for instance, rolled out a red bus with painted on it the questionable message ‘We send the EU £350 million a week; let's fund our NHS [National Health Service] instead’, and printed a poster suggesting Turkey was about to join the EU.

2 The project ‘Living with Hard Times: How Citizens React to Economic Crises and Their Social and Political Consequences’ (LIVEWHAT) received funding from the European Union’s 7^th Framework Programme under grant agreement n° 613237.

3 As a robustness check, we ran all analyses (i) excluding some of the ‘more debatable’ populist parties (e.g. M5S, PiS), (ii) for each country individually, and (iii) only in countries where both left- and right-wing populist parties were present. All substantive results remained the same. For more details on the recoding scheme and a full list of populist parties, we refer to Section A of the online appendix.

4 For more details about question wording and country specific translations, we refer to Section B in the online appendix.

5 In Section C of the online appendix we provide the average difficulty and discrimination parameters for each IRT latent variable, based on each of the information questions. For a detailed overview of scale construction in general and some of the main advantages of IRT more specifically, see Kankaraš et al. (2011); Raju et al. (2002); Reise et al. (1993).

6 We also applied more complex model specifications, using attitudinal variables such as cultural prejudice, authoritarianism, social trust, and satisfaction with government policy, but none of them showed different results from the more parsimonious model that we use here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stijn van Kessel

Stijn van Kessel is Senior Lecturer in European Politics at Queen Mary University of London. His main research interests are populism, Euroscepticism and pro-EU activism, and the discourse, voters, and electoral performance of populist parties in Europe. He is joint convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy, joint editor of the Routledge Extremism & Democracy book series, and joint editor of the journal Politics. He is also the author of the monograph Populist Parties in Europe: Agents of Discontent (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has published articles in journals including European Journal of Political Research, Government and Opposition, Journal of European Integration, British Journal of Politics and International Relations and Journal of Political Ideologies. [[email protected]]

Javier Sajuria

Javier Sajuria is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London. His research interests lie in the intersection of comparative political behaviour, political parties, social media, and quantitative methods. He is the Principal Investigator for Candidaturas Chile and collaborates with the UK chapter of the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Politics. Some of his academic articles have appeared in Party Politics, American Politics Research, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Electoral Studies, amongst others. [[email protected]]

Steven M. Van Hauwaert

Steven M. Van Hauwaert is a Lecturer at the University of Surrey and the principal investigator of the Global Public Opinions Project (GPOP). His primary research interests are in the fields of comparative political behaviour and public opinion, as well as populism and other challenges to democracy. His most recent academic contributions have appeared in Acta Politica, Comparative European Politics, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, the European Political Science Review, European Societies and the Journal of European Integration. He is also an associate editor of the ECPR journal Political Research Exchange (PRX). [[email protected]]