Fuelling Dissatisfaction? Estimating the Effect of a Populist Message on Political Discontent and Populist Voting

Studies have found that political discontent and populist voting are negatively related. Yet an important shortcoming of these studies is that they present the correlation between these two phenomena as evidence that existing feelings of political discontent contribute to the success of populist parties. We argue that this causal effect might just as well run in the opposite direction: populist parties might also fuel political discontent by exposing their supporters to a populist message. To assess whether the populist message is indeed capable of fueling political discontent, we designed an experimental study that estimates the effect of the populist message on discontent and populist voting. In the experiment, we assigned participants at random to three groups. The three groups were exposed to identical messages that contained different levels of populism. By means of a pre- and post-test we measure background characteristics, levels of political discontent and vote intention.