The Effects of Populist Political Communication on Populist Attitudes Across National Contexts in Europe

Throughout the globe, populism is on the rise. Populist ideas can manifest themselves either on the supply side as a characteristic of political communication or as attitudes on the demand side of citizens. Populist political communication can be understood as communicative messages that resonate with the goals, motives, and attitudes of populist political actors, the media, or citizens. Exposure to these messages may influence the extent to which citizens use populist ideas as a frame of reference for the interpretation of societal issues. These so-called populist attitudes reflect the ideational core of populism: the central divide between the in-group of the ordinary hard-working people and the “corrupt” elites. In the past few years, a number of studies have investigated the explanatory factors of populist attitudes. However, these studies have mainly been conducted in a single-country context. Building further on this, we have conducted an extensive 15-country experiment (N = 7,323), in which we manipulated three kinds of populist messages. These messages dealt with the (fictional) declining purchase power of citizens and (1) emphasized the in-group of the ordinary hard-working people (i.e., homogenous people cue), or (2) blamed the “self-interested” and “unresponsive” elites for the negative outcome (i.e., anti-elite cue), or (3) contained a combination of both cues (i.e., combined – populist - cue). Based on the premises of social identity theory, and the mechanisms of priming and trait activation, we expected that exposure to these populist messages would activate or prime message-congruent perceptions. In line with existing research, we distinguished between three dimensions of populist attitudes: preference for popular sovereignty, anti-establishment attitudes, and belief in a homogeneous people. Using multilevel analyses, the preliminary results of our study indicate that, overall, populist messages can shape corresponding populist attitudes. Specifically, we found that the homogenous people cue increased receivers’ preference for people’s sovereignty as well as their belief in a homogeneous and virtuous people. Furthermore, anti-elite populist messages strengthened anti-establishment attitudes. The comparative set-up of our experiment further allowed us to assess how the effects of populist messages differed across contexts. We expected that populist messages would have the strongest effects when they resonated with opportunity structures. The effects of exposure to populist messages indeed differed across countries in such a way that anti-elite cues had a stronger effect on both anti-establishment attitudes as well as beliefs in people’s sovereignty in countries with a moderate or high vote share of populist parties. In sum, these results, for the first time in a comprehensive comparative context, show that populist messages can activate citizens’ message-congruent populist perceptions. Additionally, citizens seem to be most susceptible to populist political communication in those countries that deal with successful populist political parties. Overall, these findings suggest that populist political communication needs to be taken into account when investigating the patterns and change of populist attitudes.