The populist impulse: Cognitive reflection, populist attitudes and candidate preferences

Abstract

In this paper, I examine cognitive reflection, i.e., the ability to suppress one's spontaneous intuition to engage in higher-level analytical thinking, as a predictor of populist attitudes and candidate preferences. I develop a set of hypotheses which link the ideological content of populism to lower levels of cognitive reflection. I test these hypotheses with an original survey conducted on a representative sample of the UK population, in which respondents were asked to complete a cognitive reflection test, answer questions from a scale of populist attitudes, and respond to a conjoint experiment of hypothetical parliamentary candidates whose populist ideology is randomly attributed. I find that populist attitudes are negatively associated with cognitive reflection (p < 0.05). Furthermore, I also find suggestive evidence that anti-elite and conflict-seeking conjoint attributes interact negatively with respondent-level cognitive reflection on the formation of conjoint preferences (p < 0.1). However, I find no such interaction with respect to people centric attributes.