Abstract
AbstractThe 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.
Highlights
The rise of populist forces in Western democracies is often linked to representation failures
Several studies have found a strong relationship between populist attitudes and vote choice for populists (e.g., Schumacher and Rooduijn, 2013; Akkerman et al, 2014; Oliver and Rahn, 2016; Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018): citizens who rage against the political elite, put their trust in the people’s “general will” and view politics in black-and-white terms are significantly more willing to support populist forces
The complier average causal effect (CACE) is the estimate in the second stage capturing the causal effect of feelings of representation on populist attitudes
Summary
Political science has recently coordinated on a common ideational definition of populism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013; Rooduijn, 2018). Castanho Silva (2018) presents some observational evidence linking the formation of grand coalitions—a particular form of party collusion—and populist party success, and Oliver and Rahn (2016) show that citizens’ perceptions of party responsiveness were low in the United States preceding the election of Donald Trump as president (for further suggestive evidence from Latin America, see Ruth and Hawkins, 2017) All these studies are entirely observational and rather suggestive instead of explicitly investigating causality in the link between personal, perceived representation by parties and populist attitudes.
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