Support for a populist form of democratic politics or political discontent? How conceptions of democracy relate to support for the AfD

Abstract

A populist attitude combining people-centrism and anti-elite sentiment has been shown to influence populist party support. But how much is support for these parties associated specifically with a populist conception of democratic politics? This paper probes the importance of this facet of demand-side populism with original representative survey data from Germany. According to the findings, support for the right-wing populist party AfD is linked to voters' desire for politics to directly realize some true and unitary popular will. However, this association disappears if one accounts for voters’ political discontent. What matters instead is how much voters value pluralism versus how much they support a majoritarian-relativist form of democracy that combines the desire for direct responsiveness with a relativist outlook – without adhering to the distinctly populist notion of a single true popular will. The findings overall qualify the idea that voters of populist parties are emphatically populist.