Populist Democracy vs Liberal Democracy: A Voter Perspective

It has become almost a cliché to proclaim that populist parties continue to be successful. However, this is to be sure the case. Populist parties are electorally successful, they appear in more countries that ever before, they bridge the left/ right political spectrum, and they are or have been in government in a variety of countries. This success of populist parties has broader implications for democracy and for political representation. A reoccurring question is: does the rise of populism present a threat to democracy? Even though we know quite a bit about what populist parties think about democracy, there remains some controversy over whether populist parties pose a threat to democracy. Some scholars see populism as a pathology (Müller 2014), while others see populism as a possible corrective (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017). If controversy remains on the supply side, we know even less about the demand side. This leads us to the central research question of this paper: What do those who have stronger populist attitudes think about democracy? More importantly, what those with higher populist attitudes think about liberal democracy? Assessing the democratic values of citizens with higher populist attitudes is important. Before we can address whether populist citizens pose a threat to democracy, it is important to know what those with higher populist attitudes think about democracy, and more importantly what they think about liberal democracy. Recent literature on populist attitudes and democracy (Zaslove et al 2017; Kaltwasser and Van Hauwaert 2018) seems to indicate that populist voters do not oppose democracy per se, even though they are dissatisfied and critical. This fits with dominant supply side theories of populism. However, the broader question is: do those who have higher populist attitudes oppose core characteristics of a liberal democracy, i.e. the rule of law, minority rights? Secondly, if we assume that populists are not anti-democratic per se, while they may be critical of liberal democracy, what kind of democracy do they support? Based on existing literature on populism and democracy we test whether those with higher populist values are supportive of a direct democracy and deliberative democracy. In this paper we use a new dataset from the Netherlands (2018). The dataset is representative for the Dutch population (N. 2255). We combine a series of questions regarding different dimensions and models of democracy (see above) with the Akkerman et al (2014) populist attitude measure to test a series of hypotheses regarding populist attitudes and democracy.