What Do Radical and Populist Voters Expect from a Government Party? Findings of a Cross-National Survey Experiment

That parties fulfil their pre-election promises once they are in government is a fundamental idea of many democracy models. This paper addresses the question of whether radical and populist voters share the same ideal. In response, it presents an empirical analysis of systematic differences between different groups of radical and populist voters with respect to a hypothetic government party keeping its policy promise. Hypothesizing that voters will prefer their own as well as ideologically close parties to fulfil their promises and that this effect should be stronger for radical and populist party voters, the paper also investigates the impact of public opinion and expert views. The paper tests these hypotheses through a survey experiment conducted in Australia and Austria. It finds that, overall, voters indeed prefer their own party instead of other parties to fulfil their promises. While the opinion of the public and experts mitigates this effect, it does not significantly change it. Radical and populist voters, however, show this effect to a substantively larger extend than mainstream voters, who do not much change their preference depending on which party is in government. Radical right voters, in particular, react strongly. Thus, this paper contributes to the literature on voters’ attitudes to democracy by showing that voters indeed adapt their attitudes depending on the government of the day and that radical and populist voters do so in more pronounced ways.