Love at First Sight? Populism and Direct Democracy

Abstract

Populist parties frequently call for direct involvement of the people in policy decision-making. Yet, they also claim to be the sole legitimate representative of the ‘authentic’ people, which should supersede any voting. Does this strategy resonate with citizens that share a populist ideology? We argue that this alleged contradiction is due to a conflation of populism and stealth democracy. While both reject elite rule, populists support direct democracy as a means to implement the volonte generale, whereas stealth democrats view it as holding politicians accountable for ineffective policy solutions. Turning to the demand-side of populism, our analysis of survey data in four European democracies reveals that, controlling for stealth democratic orientations, individuals with stronger populist attitudes support direct democracy more. This effect is observed using a measure combining the key dimensions of populism, namely anti-elitism and people-centrism, and another measure separating the feature shared with stealth democracy — anti-elitism — from the one unique to populism, people-centrism. Our finding supports that populist citizens favour direct democracy hoping for political decisions that match their predetermined preferences.