Populist Attitudes and Direct Democracy: A Questionable Relationship

Sergiu Gherghina,Jean‐Benoit Pilet

doi:10.1111/spsr.12451

Sergiu Gherghina, Jean‐Benoit Pilet

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1111/spsr.12451

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Abstract

AbstractEarlier research links citizens’ populist attitudes with the support for referendums. However, the foundations and meaning of this relationship remain unclear. This research note proposes a theoretical, conceptual and methodological discussion that identifies three main problems: studies linking populist attitudes with support for referendums have a rather narrow theoretical framing limited to populist studies, there is much ambiguity surrounding the role of direct democracy in the political system, and there is a tautology in studying the relationship between populist attitudes as measured through various indices and the preferences for direct democracy. Our goal is to discuss such problems and to propose several avenues to circumvent them. In particular, we believe that connecting to adjacent literatures beyond populist studies could be an important improvement.

Highlights

IntroductionSeveral works have recently tried to connect citizens’ populist attitudes with support for referendums
Several works have recently tried to connect citizens’ populist attitudes with support for referendums. They build upon longstanding reflections among scholars working on ideational – as opposed to strategic or discursive – populism regarding the conception of democracy promoted by populist actors. They describe the people-centric nature of populism (Canovan 1999; Mair 2002; Mudde 2004) that promotes a model of democracy in which the people should lie at the core of democracy and “politics should be an expression of the volonte generale of the People” (Mudde 2004: 543)
We argue that studies linking populist attitudes with support for referendums suffer from a problem of theoretical framing

Summary

Introduction

Several works have recently tried to connect citizens’ populist attitudes with support for referendums They build upon longstanding reflections among scholars working on ideational – as opposed to strategic or discursive – populism regarding the conception of democracy promoted by populist actors. Evidence comes from the Netherlands (Jacobs et al 2018; Zaslove et al 2020), a comparison of France, Germany, Switzerland and the UK (Mohrenberg et al 2019), and 17 European countries (Rose and Wessels 2020) These studies have the concept of populist attitudes in common, but they operationalize it differently. We know little about what kind of democracy they support, or how they want it to be organized (Kaltwasser and van Hauwaert 2020) In spite of their merits, we believe that these studies are far from closing the debate.

A Problem of Theoretical Framing

A Conceptual Problem

A Methodological Problem

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