Populist Attitudes, Spatial Considerations, and Electoral Availability

Populist attitudes are of increasing interest for research on populism as they constitute a major foundation of populist parties’ success. One aspect of populist attitude is the unwillingness to compromise and a view of society as vertically divided between the people and the elite disregarding any horizontal cleavages. Ideological elements do matter, but hostile attitudes toward the elite – pushing populist citizens away from mainstream parties – are mostly identified as the core element explaining support for populist parties. In this paper I analyze the role of citizens with populist attitudes in electoral competition. Competition over political issues is a central characteristic of democratic elections. Political parties differ in the policy positions they defend and in the political or social problems they emphasize in their electoral manifestos and during the campaign. Building on the literature on voter heterogeneity on the one hand and on spatial models of party competition on the other hand, I firstly ask whether populist voters have the same choice criteria as non-populist voters. As populist citizens are at least skeptical about political actors, their responsiveness, and their ability for representing the will of the people, I specifically assume that ideological and issue positions – factors basically pulling voters towards parties – play a different role in shaping party preferences of populist citizens: Issue and ideological proximities to political parties should be less import to them. Secondly, I analyze the implications of this presumptive non-approachability by issue positions of political parties. Most importantly, voters with populist attitudes should be less available on the electoral market. I present an individualized measure of electoral competition based on propensities to vote as indicator of the availability of voters to different political parties. Using Stefano Bartolini’s multidimensional concept of political competition, I compare the electoral availabilities of voters without populist attitudes to those of populist voters. Hypotheses based on this reasoning will be tested in an in-depth case study of the German electorate and comparatively using data from the European Election Study (EES). Finally, I discuss the implications for political competitive between mainstream parties and populist actors.