Populist is as Populist Does? Measuring Strategic Populism and Voter Responses Across Europe

Populism is frequently diagnosed as a threat to democratic stability and legitimacy across contemporary Europe. Yet this diagnosis remains incomplete: while scholars extensively document the rise of populist parties, the empirical evidence for whether voters actually respond to populist rhetoric—and under what conditions—remains surprisingly limited. This gap is consequential. Understanding whether strategic populist communication genuinely reshapes voter behavior is essential for assessing populism's true democratic effects and for designing institutions resilient to populist mobilization. Existing research has primarily focused on ideational populism—populism as a coherent ideological worldview opposing "the pure people" to "the corrupt elite." This ideational approach has generated valuable theoretical insights, yet it has given far less scholarly attention to strategic populism: how political parties actively frame and deploy populist appeals in their political communication. This asymmetry is surprising given that voters' electoral behavior is shaped not only by elite ideology but by how parties strategically communicate their positions and appeals. The central question is whether strategic populist framing—independent of ideational populism—affects voter attitudes and behavior across different democratic contexts. To address this gap, we present a novel dataset measuring populist rhetoric across 908 party manifestos in 24 European democracies from 2000 to 2021. We employ a combined measurement approach using dictionary-based methods and word embeddings to identify both ideational and strategic dimensions of populist communication. Critically, this data is linked to individual-level survey data from the European Social Survey through multilevel modeling, allowing us to test whether variation in parties' strategic populist rhetoric shapes voter attitudes and political preferences beyond what we would expect from individual-level and institutional factors alone. Our empirical approach bridges the supply-demand nexus of populist mobilization: while much research examines either party supply (who uses populism?) or voter demand (who supports populists?), we examine the crucial connection between them. Does strategic populist rhetoric actually mobilize voters in predictable ways, or are electoral dynamics driven by other factors regardless of rhetorical strategy? Moreover, we assess whether any effects vary systematically across the diverse institutional contexts, party systems, and voter compositions represented in our 24-country sample. These results have important implications for understanding democratic resilience. If strategic populism operates uniformly across contexts, democracies face a common challenge requiring institutional safeguards. Conversely, if effects are contingent on context, democracies may contain populist mobilization through different institutional and communicative practices. Overall, our findings provide an empirical foundation for moving beyond populism diagnosis toward evidence-based democratic renewal. Understanding the varieties of strategic populisms—and their actual effects on citizen engagement with democracy—informs how democracies might design institutions and communication norms to either build resilience against destabilizing populist appeals or recognize where populist mobilization generates forms of democratic responsiveness worth preserving.