Populace and Populism: A Correlational Class Analysis of Populist Beliefs in the General Public

Populism supply studies commonly define populism as (1) the combination of people-centrism with political cynicism, (2) as anti-elitist and anti-pluralist, and (3) as ideologically ‘thin’. However, little research has investigated if this supply-definition of populism as a consistent set of ideas holds up in the general public. In this paper, we conduct an individual-level analysis of populist beliefs using data from Flanders (N = 1449) by analyzing how people interrelate four political attitudes: people-centrism, political cynicism, elitism, and pluralism. Correlational class analysis is used to separate the sample into different clusters with different ways of interrelating the four political attitudes. Results show four distinct clusters: pluralist populists, anti-pluralist populists, ambiguous beliefs, and disordered beliefs. Further analyses show that higher levels of populist attitudes are related to more right-wing ideological attitudes in each cluster and that higher educated and more politically interested people belong to the anti-pluralist populist cluster.