Populists participate in and shape democracy — but do they believe in it? That’s the question that Julian Erhardt and Maximilian Filsinger set out to tackle in their new article published in the journal of West European Politics.
The public discourse, they explain, presents populists as either a threat to or a corrective for democracy. But they want to know whether populists themselves support democracy. To determine this, they used data from an original six country panel. The data came from France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It was gathered at three different points (“November 2020 to January 2021; April to May 2021 and January to March 2020”) and brought in 1,000 respondents per country and survey wave.
The questions they were honing in on within their general field of inquiry were whether populists were more or less likely to support democracy in theory; the role of the “host ideology”; and how components of populism contribute to the relationship between populists and democracy. They believed that they would find a negative correlation between populist attitudes and support for democracy.
“Manichean Outlook”
They found “robust evidence … that populism is indeed negatively related to democratic regime preferences.” However, by teasing populist attitudes apart, they were able to find that not all populisms are equal: not all “forms and sub-dimensions” of populism threaten democracy, and in fact some are even, to an extent, positively correlated. It is primarily rightwing populism, specifically, and a “Manichean outlook on society” that is “negatively related to diffuse support for democracy in the general public.”
They found “robust evidence … that populism is indeed negatively related to democratic regime preferences.”
It is only when the “Manichean outlook” joins alongside anti-elitism and people-centrism that they turn toward a negative relationship with democracy (people-centrism politics, on their own, may in fact support democratic attitudes).
To the authors, “This underlines the need for democratic societies to address the dangers of an exclusionary populism and the radical polarization inherent in a Manichean worldview.”
The authors acknowledge that their study is limited to Europe, and future research could go beyond that continent, and account for “specific supply-side effects,” which went beyond their own scope. Given their findings on the work of ideology, they are particularly curious about “inclusive” populism in Latin America and its relationship to democracy. They also note the need for more research into the question as it relates to newer democracies.
Still, they feel that their research highlights that populism can, to an extent, be a threat to democracy and democratic attitudes. They think so. Even more importantly, they highlight the need to address specific facets of populism to combat this trend. “It is thus crucial,” they conclude, “for democratic societies to foster the understanding and acceptance of different political viewpoints in the face of increasing populism.”
