Populists and Perceptions of Referendums as a Political Decision Making Process

Direct democracy (and especially the use of referendums) is increasingly seen as a remedy to growing political discontent and eroding confidence in the institutions of representative democracy. The rising demand for direct democracy is partially a consequence of the growth of radical right populist parties. These parties and their supporters regard the conflict of interest between the “innocent” people and the “corrupt” elite as the main problem of representative democracy. In that conflict, direct democratic innovations, such as referendums, are perceived as useful instruments that help “ordinary people” to take power back from “the elites”. In other words, referendums are viewed as superior to representative democracy when it comes to securing the interests of the majority, or “the will of the people”, where “the people” is defined as the native population. In this paper, we set out to investigate the relationship between populist and nativist attitudes on one side and perceptions of referendums as a process of democratic decision-making on the other. First, we use data from the European Social Survey, to map preferences for democratic decision-making through referendum in European democracies, focusing on people with nativist attitudes and supporters of radical right populist parties. Second, we use a conjoint experiment embedded in the Norwegian Citizen Panel to dig deeper into the link between nativism and perceptions of referendums. The experiment is designed to investigate the type of mandate that a referendum confers in the political decision-making process. The respondents are given different scenarios of a referendum on EU membership, where the level of turnout, size of majority and outcome are varied. Some respondents are not exposed to these treatments. Then all respondents are asked to assess whether or not the government should follow the outcome. The design thereby allows for comparisons of ex ante and ex post assessments of the legitimacy of a referendum as a political decision-making procedure. This provides a great opportunity to investigate whether or not nativists and supporters of the radical right populist Progress Party (which is the most referendum-positive party in Norway) perceive the legitimacy of referendums differently than mainstream party supporters. Given what we know about populist voters’ views of what democracy ought to be, we expect that populist voters and voters harboring nativist views are less sensitive to lower levels of turnout and the size of the winning majority than are non-nativist voters.