Examining populist attitudes among ethnic-minority voters and its effect on their voting behaviour

With the rise op populist parties, a literature grew exploring what makes populist parties populist and who votes for these parties. In the last decade, a way to measure populist attitude among voters has been developed (Akkerman et al., 2014). This construct is theoretically and empirically different from other political attitudinal concepts like trust and efficacy (Geurkink et al., 2020) and helps to explain voting for populist parties (Akkerman et al., 2014; Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel, 2018). Yet so far it has hardly been assessed to what extent populist attitudes are also informative for understanding the electoral preferences of ethnic minorities. Often datasets include too few ethnic-minority voters to meaningfully study this, and do justice to the different ethnic minority groups without lumping them all together. By using unique data collected in two consecutive elections in the Netherlands, we wish to address this gap in the literature. Our main research question is: If and to what degree populist attitudes among different groups of ethnic minority voters affects voting for populist parties. First, we build on the seminal work by Akkerman et al. (2014) and test whether their populist attitudes items, designed to capture the different elements of a thin-centered ideology, also form a single scale among (different groups of) ethnic-minority voters in the Netherlands. Thereby, and building on Geurkink et al. (2020), we also assess whether the concept is distinguishable from related but theoretically different concepts like political trust and external efficacy. Second, we assess whether populist attitudes are related to voting for populist parties among ethnic-minority voters. Did ethnic-minority voters who left the social democrats move to left-wing- or ethnic-minority populist parties? (cf. Otjes et al., 2023) And do we find traces of some groups, like East Asian and Latin-American voters gearing towards right-wing populism if they hold more populist attitudes? Empirically, we focus on the Netherlands for three reasons: (1) it was the seminal case for measuring populist attitudes; (2) left-wing (SP), right-wing (PVV, FvD, JA21) and ethnic-minority (DENK) populist parties participate(d) in the 2021 and upcoming 2023 elections - in the paper we digress more on the specific populism of DENK (see POPPA-data.eu); and (3) the Dutch National Election Study 2021 and 2023 oversampled voters with a ‘non-Western first- and second- generation migration background’ and includes a wide variety of populist and other attitudes, voting behavior, PTVs and a very diverse set of ethnic-minority citizens, allowing us to test the concept validity across groups. Akkerman, A., Mudde, C., & Zaslove, A. (2014). How populist are the people? Measuring populist attitudes in voters. CPS, 47(9):1324-1353. Geurkink, B., Zaslove, A., Sluiter, R., & Jacobs, K. (2020). Populist attitudes, political trust, and external political efficacy. Political Studies, 68(1):247-267. Lubbers, M., Otjes, S. & Spierings, N. (2023). What drives the propensity to vote for ethnic-minority-interest parties? Acta Politica . 1-32. Van Hauwaert, S. M., & Van Kessel, S. (2018). A cross‐national analysis of the effect of populist attitudes and issue positions on populist party support. EJPR, 57(1):68-92.