Populism from Below: The Ideological and Social Correlates of Populist Attitudes in Greece

Even though Greece has a long tradition in populist politics and populism studies, the paper offers a first time investigation of populism in the country from the perspective of political demand. The investigation of populist attitudes at the mass level relies on a new battery of questions specifically designed for this purpose and included in the Hellenic National Election Study (ELNES) of January 2015. Findings reveal a) that populism at the mass level constitutes a separate ideological dimension but is closely associated with statist, Eurosceptic and anti-memorandum attitudes, confirming the expectation that Greek populism is closer to what has been described in the literature on Greece as “national-populism”; b) voters of SYRIZA and ANEL display a higher level of populist attitudes in relation to the rest of the electorate; c) analysis of the determinants of populist attitudes reveal that individual-level traits associated with the so-called “losers of globalization” tend to be positively correlated with populist attitudes.