Do parties’ representation failures affect populist attitudes? Evidence from a multinational survey experiment

The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures. However, to date we lack causally identified evidence for the effect of parties’ representation on populist attitudes. We address this lacuna through a survey experiment conducted in 12 European Union coun...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPolitical science research and methods Vol. 11; no. 2; pp. 347 - 362
Main Authors Castanho Silva, Bruno, Wratil, Christopher
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.04.2023
Subjects
Attitudes
Citizen participation
Democracy
Elections
Ideology
Political parties
Polls & surveys
Populism
Power
Representation
Respondents
Voters
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Summary:The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures. However, to date we lack causally identified evidence for the effect of parties’ representation on populist attitudes. We address this lacuna through a survey experiment conducted in 12 European Union countries involving 23,257 subjects. Our experiment manipulates citizens’ perceptions of being represented by national parties in the 2019 European elections campaign, and identifies the effect of perceived representation on populist attitudes. The results reveal that poor representation increases populist attitudes in respondents that did not express such attitudes pretreatment, but has no effect among those who were already populist. We demonstrate that this effect is primarily due to parties’ representation failures triggering citizens’ anti-elite sentiment.
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ISSN:2049-8470
2049-8489
DOI:10.1017/psrm.2021.63