Populist Attitudes and Political Engagement: Ugly, Bad, and Sometimes Good?

ABSTRACT

Representation failures are one of the main reasons for the emergence of populism in contemporary politics. Mainstream parties’ convergence towards the centre left parts of the electorate to feel underrepresented. Populists are successful when they engage apathetic voters. In this sense, populism is suggested to be a potential corrective to democracy as long as it engages dissatisfied and disenfranchised citizens, helping close the representation gap. We test this proposition in three experiments with samples from two different countries, to test whether the activation of populist attitudes has impacts on normatively positive and negative political participation. The experimental manipulations show that triggering populism neither makes individuals more likely to participate nor to donate to a political campaign. We also find that activation of populist attitudes makes people more likely to accept political apathy and justify not-voting. Our findings contribute to the ‘threat or corrective democracy’ debate, which suggests populism’s involvement in more political participation. Ultimately, and unfortunately, it does not seem like populism is an effective answer to ever falling levels of political participation or representational gaps in Western democracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• participation
• political
• experiment
• psychology

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Special Issue editors Annika Werner and Heiko Giebler for their comments and advice. We thank the participants at the Workshop “Minding the Gap? The Populist Surge and its Consequences for Representation”. We also thank the members of Team Populism and the participants of the “Team Populism Conference” in Dubrovnik for their comments on the earlier version of this study.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

M. Murat Ardag is a post-doc researcher affiliated with the University of Oldenburg and Jacobs University. His research interests include psychometrics, modeling subjectivity, and comparative politics.

Bruno Castanho Silva is a postdoctoral researcher at the Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, University of Cologne. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Central European University, and his research focuses on populism in comparative perspective and quantitative methods.

J. Philipp Thomeczek is a research associate at the University of Münster, Institute for Political Science. His main research interests are the comparative study of populism, party system change, and voting behavior.

Steffen F. Bandlow-Raffalski is university lecturer at Jacobs University, Bremen. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. His research interests are voting behavior, political participation, and empirical research methods.

Levente Littvay researches survey and quantitative methodology, and the psychology of radicalism and populism. Award-winning teacher of graduate courses in methods, voting behavior, political psychology, and American politics. Academic co-convener of ECPR’s Methods Schools, Team Populism's head of Team Survey and member of the European Social Survey round 10 (2020-21) democracy module questionnaire design team.

Notes

1 Data collected as part of a larger survey conducted by the Political Behaviour Research group (Central European University, in Budapest). Due to the length if the survey, a planned missing data design (PMDD) was used to lighten the burden in respondents. Because the survey was conducted online, it was possible have missingness happening completely at random (Rubin, 1976; Schafer & Graham, 2002).

2 See the Appendix for confirmatory factor analysis models presenting the measurement properties of all scales used.

3 The lack of significance might also be a statistical artefact due to low reliability in the measurement instrument. See full results in the Appendix.

4 See the question wording, latent constructs and the indicators in the Appendix, along with the descriptive statistics and the details of the measurement models. The (dis)identification scale is adopted from Becker and Tausch (2014).

5 We also asked participants to write their thoughts and opinions about the slogans and demonstrations and performed quantitative text analysis on the open responses. See the Appendix for more details about the experimental treatment procedure. The open-ended responses in the Leipzig (/GDR-protest) condition indicate that many participants associated ‘Wir sind das Volk’ more with PEGIDA since this is the more recent and salient event.