Examining the existence of subtypes of populist individuals, and analyzing their effect on affinity with democratic innovation initiatives

In the ideational approach to populism, the concept is a thin-centred ideology that can be attached to various thick-centred ones. For supply-side actors - parties and politicians-, the combination of populism with a so-called ‘host-ideology’ results in roughly two ‘subtypes’ of populism: left-wing populism and right-wing populism (Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013; March, 2017). These different ‘flavours’ of populism are largely due to different conceptions of populist core concepts ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, whereby both 'empty signifiers' are infused by the respective host-ideologies (Castanho Silva et al., 2018). While several studies have mapped the different subtypes of populist supply-side actors, such research has not yet been done into populist demand-side actors, i.e. individuals (but see Akkerman et al., 2017; Mohrenberg et al, 2019; Heinisch & Wegscheider, 2020). It is however reasonable to expect that populist individuals can equally be divided into subtypes, given for instance that host-ideologies have already been shown to significantly affect populist voting behaviour (Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel, 2018; Marcos-Marne, 2020). This article investigates the existence of subtypes of populist individuals resulting from different context-dependent conceptions of populist core concepts. It moreover studies the relevance of distinguishing between subtypes of populist individuals by analysing its impact on affinity with different kinds of democratic innovations. Specifically, having an exclusionary (as opposed to an inclusionary) concept of the people is expected to affect assessments of aggregative versus deliberative forms of democratic innovations.