Solving the Puzzle of Populism

Survey research on populist attitudes presents us with a puzzle: populist attitudes are prevalent, but support for actual populist movements is not. We agree with current work which suggests that framing effects explain the activation of populist attitudes, but suggest that these framing effects require the existence of actual issues that make the frame sensible, especially issues that constitute a normative threat. To test this, we present results from a series of experiments conducted with U.S. citizens on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Participants in the control group are given a short description of a competent outsider candidate for Congress. One treatment group receives an additional audio file with populist language from the candidate; a second group receives a series of questions on “problems facing our country”; and a third group receives both treatments. Preliminary results show that populism is a distinct worldview and that populist attitudes are activated by normative threats.