Populist attitudes: bringing together ideational and communicative approaches

Abstract

The study of populist attitudes has thus far drawn heavily on ideational definitions of populism, focussing almost exclusively on attitudes related to dimensions such as people-centredness and anti-elitism. However, these accounts have largely ignored other approaches to populism, especially the discursive-performative school which see populism as something that is communicated and done by political actors. We argue that when studying populist attitudes, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we develop a novel measure of attitudes towards populist communication and consider how these interact with populist ideational attitudes. Testing our measures on the Australian case, we demonstrate that attitudes towards populist communication exist independently of populist ideational attitudes, and that they have a significant effect on voting behaviour and on attitudes related to the ideational approach. Therefore, we argue that studies of populist attitudes need to take attitudes towards populist communication into account in future work.

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