Are Populists Sore Losers? Explaining Populists’ Preferences for and Reactions to Referendums

Populist citizens pose a core challenge to contemporary democracies: they are highly dissatisfied with the political system and question its legitimacy because they feel they are not listened to. They are also more likely to support protest parties with sometimes anti-democratic tendencies. The fundamental question becomes: what can be done to bring these subgroups of society back into the political realm and increase their perceptions of legitimacy? Can increased participatory opportunities provide an answer to this question? Judging from public opinion surveys, populists are particularly in favour of decision making via referendums. Does this reflect a genuine desire for different decision-making procedures and can referendums then foster legitimacy with political decisions? Or do populists instead, as often assumed, only like referendums because they are expected to provide them with favorable outcomes? In this paper, we aim to study populists’ preferences for and reactions to decision making via referendums on a real case: the Dutch 2018 referendum on the competences of the Intelligence and Security Services. Using high quality survey data from both before and after the referendum took place (LISS,N=XX), we address two research questions. First, is populists’ support for referendums more driven by instrumental motives than for non-populists? Second, are populists more likely than non-populists to accept the outcome of a referendum if the results are unfavourable? Given that losers’ consent is a crucial resource for a democracy, obtaining it from one of the most dissatisfied groups in society presents an important challenge. Preliminary findings show that, counter to conventional wisdom, populists’ support for referendums is not more instrumentally motivated than those of non-populists. Second, populists were in fact more willing to accept unfavourable outcomes as the result of the referendum than non-populists and therefore seem to hold more principled views on the legitimacy of referendums as a decision-making tool than previously assumed.