How Many Different Types of Populists are There in Germany? A Multi-Method Approach with a Quasi-Representative Sample

Recent years have witnessed growing interest in the demand-side of populism; however, to this date, not many studies have addressed the heterogeneity in populist attitudes. We have a quasi-representative sample of German voters. We measured their populist attitudes in three dimensions (people-centrism, anti-elitism, Manichean view of politics, which is perceiving politics as a struggle between good and evil) using the scale developed by Silva et al. (2017). In two experimental conditions, we treated the participants with people-centric and anti-elitist slogans comparing these conditions to a control group. We measured populism two times during our study; before and after the experimental treatments. We apply latent profile analysis to investigate the populist attitude before treatment; we also utilize structural topic modeling to investigate the different viewpoints in populist attitudes after the experimental treatments. Latent profile analysis revealed six distinct types of populists. Structural topic modeling results complement this finding: participants in the study framed their opinions about people-centric and anti-elitist slogans in six distinct ways as a function of our experimental treatment. Furthermore, these six different ways of framing the populist slogans had different associations with different dimensions of populist attitudes. Overall, our findings suggest that populism scholars might need to start accounting for heterogeneity in the populist attitudes. Acknowledging this heterogeneity might help us explain the normative and empirical debates in the field, especially when it comes to the operationalization of the construct. Populist attitudes manifest themselves differently within and among individuals, both quantitatively and qualitatively.