Who Cares About Valence Issues? Issue Priorities Among Voters of Valence Populist Parties

Recent research has shown that not all populist parties compete in the same way. In particular, the concept of valence populism captures parties that deliberately avoid clear ideological positioning and instead seek to mobilize voters through non-positional appeals such as anti-corruption, political integrity, and governing competence. While this literature has substantially improved our understanding of party strategies and elite-level positioning, it remains largely silent on the demand-side implications of valence populism. In particular, we know little about whether the logic of valence populism is reflected in voters’ issue priorities, and whether voters of valence populist parties differ systematically from other populist and non-populist electorates. This paper addresses this gap by examining the relationship between valence populism and voters’ issue salience in European Parliament elections. Building on classic theories of valence competition and recent typologies of populist parties, the analysis asks whether support for valence populist parties is associated with a distinctive structure of issue priorities compared to support for other populist and non-populist parties. Empirically, the paper relies on individual-level survey data from the European Election Study (EES) for the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament elections. These waves include a harmonized measure of respondents’ most important issue, which is used to capture issue salience from the voters’ perspective. All issue categories are reclassified into theoretically grounded domains, distinguishing between valence and positional issues, as well as specific substantive domains. Party choice is linked to Zulianello’s (2025) PopulisTree taxonomy, which differentiates between valence populist parties and other populist types. The analysis employs fixed-effects logistic regression models with country and election-year fixed effects, focusing on associations between vote choice and issue salience, while accounting for individual-level socio-demographic and ideological heterogeneity. The results reveal a clear and consistent pattern. Voters of valence populist parties are significantly more likely to prioritize non-positional issues, most notably corruption and institutional competence, than voters of both other populist parties and non-populist parties. In contrast, right-wing populist voters display a strong association with positional issue domains, particularly immigration, while left-wing populist voters are more likely to prioritize welfare and environmental issues. These associations remain robust across a range of model specifications and sensitivity checks, including alternative sample restrictions and leave-one-country-out analyses. By shifting the focus from parties to voters, this paper contributes to the literature on populism and valence politics in two ways. First, it provides comparative, demand-side evidence that valence populism is associated with a distinctive structure of issue salience among voters. Second, it highlights the heterogeneity of populist electorates, challenging accounts that treat “the populist voter” as a homogeneous category. More broadly, the findings underscore the importance of integrating demand-side perspectives into the study of contemporary populism and issue competition.