Do Populists Really Care about Democracy? A Cross-Country Analysis of Populist Attitudes and Democratic Values

While there is widespread consensus on the tension between populism and liberal democracy at the theoretical level, the empirical question whether populist attitudes necessarily undermine democratic support is said to depend on the specific contours of citizens’ ideology. Thus, when populist attitudes spring from an "illiberal" host ideology they tend to produce equally exclusionary conceptions of "the people" and "the corrupt elite", whereas progressive ideologies can lead to inclusive definitions of the people’s "common will". However, such contentions derive from the results of a small sample of single country studies that measure populist attitudes and ideological self-placement as unidimensional constructs, rather than delving into the complex association between the multidimensional, populist "logic of articulation" and the varying manifestations of illiberal and right-wing ideologies. In this paper, we present our findings from an original survey fielded in seven different countries –Argentina, Brazil, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, and Spain (N = 9,658) – and containing an extensive battery of questions on populist attitudes, democratic support, and illiberal ideological preferences, such as nativism, traditionalism, or authoritarianism. To test the interaction effect of ideology on the relationship between populist attitudes and democratic support, we run a series of linear regression models with different specifications of all key variables.