Variants of Populism Getting Together? Matching Party and Voter Data in Populism Research

Scholars of populist parties and their voters have started to explore the relevance of populist attitudes for party choice only recently. While these studies have typically aggregated various aspects of populism in a one-dimensional measure, the proposed paper follows the ideational approach more closely by distinguishing three sub-dimensions of populism: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and Manichaeism. Based on a dataset covering recent national elections in eleven European countries (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom), it explores how important populist attitudes were for voters of populist parties compared to rival concepts such as policy, protest, and economic voting. Following extant research, populist parties as well as their left- and right-wing subtypes are initially treated as belonging to distinctive categories that distinguish them from all other, i.e. non-populist parties. In an additional step of the analysis, by contrast, estimates of the degree of populism in all parties produced by two waves of the Chapel Hill expert survey will be used as dependent variable. Whether party populism is understood as a categorical or quantitative concept, preliminary results suggest that populist attitudes are important predictors of vote choice for all variants of contemporary populism, irrespective of their “thick” host ideology. However, among these attitudes, people-centrism and anti-elitism are more important than having a Manichaean notion of the nature of politics. Crucially however, support for the latter tends to differentiate right-wing from left-wing populist voters.