Less Agreeable, More Populist? Comparative Analysis of European Survey Data

Since for today populist parties became relevant actors in most European democracies, the number of comparative studies exploring individual factors of populist support is also increasing. Along widely used socio-demographic variables populist voters are usually described as people who are less educated, more religious, more likely to belong to the precariat and less likely to belong to minority groups (Inglehart & Norris, 2016). Their anti-establishment attitude results in a low level of trust towards democratic institutions and politicians (Guiso, Herrera, Morelli, Sonno, & others, 2017). Discovering psychological characteristics of party supporters has become part of political science researches as well (see eg. Caprara & Vecchione, 2017). In their study Bakker et al (2016) used the Big Five personality trait approach to explain populist attitudes as pioneers and found that populist party supporters can be characterized with a lower level of agreeableness compared to other parties’ supporters. The findings were criticized by Schimpf and Schoen (2017) who gained negative results for the left-wing populist support and low level of agreeableness but strengthened the interrelation in case of right-wing populist voters. So for the time being research results seem contradictory in this topic. The aim of my paper is twofold: on one hand I intend to elaborate a methodology to measure agreeableness as one of the Big Five personality traits applying the variables in the Human Values block of European Social Survey data. On the other hand with multilevel regression models I investigate whether the level of agreeableness can predict voting for right- as well as left-wing populist parties across European countries. To specify European populist parties I apply the categorization elaborated by Inglehart and Norris (2016). Since the above mentioned variables are included in all waves from 2002 to 2016, the long-term analysis of agreeableness on left- and right-wing populist support becomes possible.