The Mirage of Populism: Popular Sovereignty as the Main Driver of Individual Politicization of the Democratic Renewal Issue

In a time of democratic discontent, the functioning of the institutions emerges as a new conflictual issue, with growing effects in the political arena. Although it is not fully developed in terms of salience and actor expansion (Hutter and Grande 2014), conflict over the best type of democratic system opposes supporters of the representation and defenders of participation. This paper proposes to explore this dynamic among the mass public, especially digging into the drivers of the support for reforming the institutions towards participative mechanisms, labelled support for democratic renewal (Hutter et al 2018). Considering the current populist zeitgeist (Mudde 2004) which stands as a symptom of the malfunctioning of modern democratic regimes (Pappas 2019, Rovira Kaltwasser 2012), it is tempting to posit a privileged connection between populist attitudes, critic of the representative setting and support for democratic renewal at the individual level. However, the conceptualization of populism as a multidimensional construct, which requires the simultaneous presence of antielitism, popular sovereignty and Manicheanism (Castanho Silva et al 2018, Akkerman et al 2014, Rooduijn 2014), calls for a more cautious analysis. First, when the operationalization respects the non-compensatory property of the components, populist attitudes are less widespread than presumed (Wuttke et al 2020). Second, preliminary attitudes that compose populism may have independent effects when assessed separately. For extent some may support democratic renewal because they resent the representatives, others because they aspire to a greater role in decision-making processes (Dalton et al 2001). Building on these fruitful considerations, this research intends to gauge separately the effects of antielitism, popular sovereignty and Manicheanism as drivers of the support for democratic renewal, as well as compare them to the effect of populism, which locates at the intersection of the three. In order to conduct such research agenda, I make use of an original dataset from a cross-national survey, fielded online in six West European countries (Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain; average sample of 1,300 per country; data collection in Spring 2019). The questionnaire includes especially designed items on preferences in terms on democratic renewal and reproduces the full scales proposed by Akkerman et al (2014). Preliminary results show that if populist attitudes appear to be a strong driver of support for democratic renewal at first glance, it is in fact an artefact. Testing for the effects of the separate dimensions that compose populism, I find that the bulk of the explanation is rather carried by popular sovereignty, while anti-elitist and Manicheanism remain weak predictors. In a similar vein, interactions effects between popular sovereignty and democratic discontent is much stronger and more significative than with the other components of populism. This research entails important food for thought about the diagnostic of the stakes at play in the political arena. If the demand for a democratic renewal is more fueled by the simple belief in popular sovereignty than by the complex Manichean worldview of an antagonist relationship between the people and the elite, it may change how political actors choose to address it.