It's Popular to Be Populist. The Social Desirability of Populist Attitudes

While the early literature on populism was focused on delineating the concept and studying populist parties, the field has recently shifted to the analysis of voters’ populist attitudes. We examine whether standard measures of populist attitudes are subject to social desirability bias, and conjecture that because populism is seen as the “ideology of democracy” that rejects political corruption, it is highly socially desirable. This may impede analyses of populist attitudes. Focusing on Germany as a prime example for a perceived populist wave, we present results from three list (or “item-count”) experiments embedded in a two-wave panel of German voters (2015/2016). We find strong support for our conjecture revealing a tendency of voters to overreport their “true” populist attitudes in direct vs. unobtrusive questioning. This tendency is stronger among the highly educated as well as among non-voters and supporters of populist par-ties. We demonstrate the consequences of overreporting for inferences about the antecedents of populist attitudes. In particular, the effects of education and income on populist attitudes become stronger and more statistically identifiable if we account for reporting bias. We advise research-ers investigating populist attitudes to address social desirability concerns in their study designs and conclusions. For the broader debate on populism, our results highlight that extremist parties may be adopting populist ideology to counterbalance their socially undesirable left- and right-extremist messaging with socially desirable populist discourse.