The Study of Populism Through Experiments

Abstract

The reemergence of populist parties and movements in recent years has brought new scholarly attention to populism. This work has clarified what was previously a vague, contested concept and produced tools for measuring populism with precision and reliability. These tools in turn are permitting us to return to the question of what causes populist movements and parties to emerge and become successful, and what their impact is on democratic politics. In this panel, we use experimental techniques (i.e., Random Controlled Trials) to test the causes and consequences of populism at the individual level. All of us draw from an approach that sees populism as an ideational phenomenon, as the existence and/or expression of a Manichaean worldview that equates Good with the putative “will of the people” and Evil with a conspiring elite. Recent survey-based research suggests that populist ideas are common across citizens of all democracies, although there is important variation within populations; thus, the expression of these attitudes among large numbers of citizens depends on additional factors that could be tested through experiments. Because this is a first step for our research, we rely heavily on online, survey-based experiments in the United States and the Netherlands. Our pilot studies have produced encouraging results, showing for example that populist attitudes are related to a need for cognitive simplicity, and that support for populist movements and parties is triggered by normative threat and the specific use of populist messages by politicians. Our eventual goal is to replicate the best of our experiments in each other’s countries, making this effort a truly cross-regional one.