Do Populist Citizens Support Democracy?

Previous research shows that populist ideas are not only widespread across the population, but also that they relate to support for democracy and democratic dissatisfaction. A recent study argues that populist citizens could be seen as critical citizens: voters who are in favor of democracy as a regime, but who are disappointed with the way in which democracy is working. Although initial empirical evidence tends to support this argument, the question remains why exactly we notice this incongruence between normative and empirical opinions of democracy. After all, by looking at support for democracy and democratic dissatisfaction, we remain puzzled about how voters interpret the concept of democracy. Given that populism is a set of ideas that not only portrays society as divided between “the corrupt elite” and “the pure people” but also defends popular sovereignty at any cost, it is not unreasonable to expect that populist citizens interpret and observe democracy differently than the traditional liberal democratic principles that define contemporary democracies. To empirically test this idea, we use new cross-national survey data for twelve European countries that permits us to empirically analyze the link between populist attitudes and not only different conceptions of democracy (e.g. direct democracy, electoral democracy, liberal democracy, social democracy, etc.) but also authoritarianism. If it were true that citizens who sympathize with populism tend to prefer a model of democracy that diverges from liberal democracy, this suggests that the prerequisites for the proper functioning of liberal democracy are challenged in important segments of the electorate.