How Populist are the Elites? Empirical Findings from Western Europe

Populist attitudes are of rising interest. Many recent works have applied the concept of populism to individual citizens in order to describe a specific quality of negative positions towards representative democracy. In very brief, populist attitudes are defined as first, a specific perception of the democratic status quo and, secondly, the preference for authoritarian and anti-pluralist forms of democracy. Briefly, citizens with populist attitudes prefer the implementation of the will of the majority, e.g. executed by a strong leadership, to the institutions of liberal democracy that guarantee pluralism, minority rights and government control. So far, most studies have applied the concept of populist attitudes to citizens or voters, while only few works have put interest in populist attitudes of the political elites. Those that do understand it as a direct measurement of party-based populism, or, in other words, a more ‘direct’ way to study populist party ideology. However, some classical attempts have shown that (1) the attitudes of individuals within the political elite vary from those of citizens, (2) there is a certain deal of heterogeneity within the political elites and (3) this variance can be explained by the roles and the experience of individuals within the political institutions. This leads to two unsolved questions. First, why should political elites display populist attitudes? Secondly, which factors moderate these attitudes? In that sense, the study of populist attitudes of members of the political elite in party democracies is a promising and rather new path within the field of populism research. The aim of the paper is therefore twofold. First, it will introduce a theoretically substantiated concept of populist attitudes of political elites. Secondly, based on the dataset of the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS), the study shall offer empirical explanations for the variance of populist attitudes among the party elites in international comparison. In doing so, it will account for the effects of political experience on the populist attitudes of political elites. The discussion will include both a summary of the empirical findings as well as a brief outline for further research in this field.