Disappearing Populists? A Panel Analysis of Populist Citizens' Referendum Behaviour in Two Referendums, 2016ꟷ2018

Recently, more and more studies examine to what extent citizens with a high degree of populist attitudes (populist citizens) or citizens who vote for populist parties (populist voters) prefer referendums as a means of decision-making. These studies find that populist citizens are more likely to prefer referendums than non-populist ones, while no such result is found for populist voters. Less attention has been devoted to how especially populist citizens behave in referendums. Do they practice what they preach? Or are they less likely to vote in referendums. While the few existing studies seem to argue that such referendum practices are constant (either they participate in each and every referendum, or they don't); we argue that this is unlikely. Both the topic and responses by politicians to earlier referendum outcomes are likely to influence whether or not a populist citizens decide to participate or not. In short: referendum practice are likely to be dynamic rather than stable. To analyse this, we combine (panel) data on the Dutch 2016 and 2018 referendums to track changes over time and examine how populist citizens' referendum practices changed. We combine statistical analyses with handcoding of answers to open questions about voters' motives - a rarely used source of information. This allows us to gain more insight into why changes may have occurred and the combination of both techniques allows for a more fine-grained analysis than those used in earlier (cross-sectional) studies.