Feeling Represented: Government Composition and Populist Attitudes

When do citizens become less populist? As populism encompasses a critique of political representation, we argue that populist attitudes decrease when voters feel that their voices are being heard. Based on this argument, we provide a causal analysis of how changes in government composition affects voters’ levels of populist attitudes relying on high quality panel data from Austria and Germany. Our findings provide strong evidence in favor of this argument: partisans strongly react to their preferred party’s change in government status. Moreover, the decrease in populist attitudes appears to be long-lasting, as populist attitudes do not completely rebound to pre-government participation levels when a party goes back into opposition. These results have important implications for the study of populism and representative democracy.