Demand without Supply: Populist Attitudes without Salient Supply-Side Factors of Populism

Mike Medeiros

doi:10.1017/s0008423921000779

Abstract

AbstractPopulism's electoral success has been linked to socio-economic crises and to inflammatory political discourse. However, little is known of populist attitudes in contexts in which these supply-side factors are not salient. The present article diverges from the conception of populism that sees it as being activated or fuelled by contextual factors and, rather, conceives populism as an ideological attitudinal dimension that can have an impact on vote choice when supply-side factors are not salient. Using the particular context of the 2015 Canadian federal election as a case to test this theory, empirical analyses support this conception of populism by demonstrating that populist attitudes can be relatively prominent and even impact vote choice in a setting in which the traditional supply-side factors to activate or fuel populism are not salient. Ultimately, populism is shown to be an important demand-side attitudinal dimension even when there is little or no fertile ground for it.

Highlights

Résumé Le succès électoral du populisme a été lié aux crises socio-économiques et aux discours politiques incendiaires
While the lack of research into the impact of populist attitudes on vote choice in Canadian federal elections makes it difficult to propose formal hypotheses, it is credible to expect that populist attitudes would have a positive relationship with voting for parties that have a history of populist rhetoric: the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) and the New Democratic Party (NDP)
The results show that social ideology helps divide Liberal Party of Canada (LPC) and CPC voters, but economic ideology is the main cleavage between the NDP and CPC voters—highlighting the importance of exploring socio-economic ideology in a multidimensional manner instead of using the unidimensional left/right axis

Summary

Introduction

Résumé Le succès électoral du populisme a été lié aux crises socio-économiques et aux discours politiques incendiaires. Populist attitudes are shown to have had an impact on vote choice in the 2015 Canadian federal election, which was an election lacking the factors to activate or fuel populism.

Results

Conclusion