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The voice of populist people? Referendum preferences, practices and populist attitudes

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Abstract

Populist parties claim that democratic regimes fail to deliver results that are in line with what ‘the people’ want. To address this policy outcome failure, they favour direct democracy (especially when in opposition). Yet we do not know whether populists’ proposed solution—referendums—resonates with ‘the people’ it wishes to empower. This study fills this gap. First, we analyse to what extent citizens with populist attitudes favour referendums. Second, we analyse to what extent populist attitudes are linked to the decision to vote in the 2016 Dutch referendum about the EU–Ukraine Association Agreement. Third, we analyse to what extent these attitudes are linked to their vote choice. To answer these questions, we use the Dutch 2016 National Referendum Survey. Among others, we find that populist citizens are more likely to favour referendums and they are more likely to cast a ‘No’-vote, regardless of their party preference and trust in government.

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Fig. 1
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Source NRO (2016)

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Notes

  1. Although some studies suggest populist parties remain remarkably silent about referendums once they enter government (Jacobs 2011; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2013).

  2. It is crucial to stress that populist attitudes are not the same as voting for populist parties. There are many reasons to vote for populist parties (the charisma of the leader, other policy positions or even strategic reasons) and many non-populist voters vote for populist parties. Conversely, many populist citizens vote for non-populist parties (or do not even vote at all).

  3. Populism is sometimes defined as a strategy or rhetorical tool. Both understandings of populism only apply to parties, not citizens.

  4. Homogenous, as opposed to the pluralist conception of the people.

  5. We provide such a robustness check in footnote 10.

  6. Mudde and Kaltwasser (2017, p. 97) note that populist citizens interpret politics “through the lens of populism”, as in: as a struggle between the good people and the corrupt elite. But ‘the´ elite can mean many different things (Mudde and Kaltwasser 2017, pp. 11–12) for different populist citizens. For a right-wing populist citizen it can be e.g. a centrist government or the mainstream media, for a left-wing populist it can be e.g. big companies. This suggests that populist citizens not only view the political elite as bad, but also the broader establishment: mainstream media, (academic) experts, big companies. In the case of the EU–Ukraine Association Treaty all of these different elites were on the Yes-side.

  7. To be fair, the Netherlands falls on the lower end of the spectrum (along with for instance, Luxembourg, Germany, Malta and Austria (Qvortrup 2014, pp. 265–273). We may thus overestimate the effect of populist attitudes, and replication in other countries is clearly useful.

  8. The panel “consists of 4500 households, comprising 7000 individuals. It is based on a true probability sample of households drawn from the population register by Statistics Netherlands. Households that could not otherwise participate are provided with a computer and Internet connection. Panel members complete online questionnaires every month of about 15–30 min in total. They are paid for each completed questionnaire. One member in the household provides the household data and updates this information at regular time intervals” (Centerdata 2016a).

  9. Some might argue that the third item is closely related to referendums. Hence, we reran our logit regressions while excluding that item from the index. The results did not change: in the voter turnout analysis, populist attitudes still did not have a significant effect, while in the vote choice model they still did so (p < 0.001).

  10. We also ran multivariate robustness checks (a set of OLS regressions), which reveal similar patterns as our bivariate correlations (cf. Appendix 2).

  11. There are hardly any individual level studies of individual level referendum voter turnout, which is why we use the variables highlighted by the well-established election voter turnout literature. One notable exception is Schuck and De Vreese (2009). In their analysis, the only control variable exhibiting a significant (and positive) effect is age. This variable is therefore included in our models.

  12. As a robustness check, we examined whether voting SP or PVV moderated the effect of populist attitudes by examining the interaction between the party vote choice and populist attitudes (both on referendum turnout and voting ‘No’). It turns out that only the interaction term of voting SP and populist attitudes in the turnout analysis was (marginally) significant (p < 0.1) and positive (+ 0.368). This suggests that supply and demand can reinforce each other, but that this is not necessarily the case.

  13. After the results were in, media noted that the ‘Yes’-camp did well in the big cities but lost to the ‘No’-camp the more rural a district was (Broer 2016). Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness, we opted to control for this by adding the Rural variable in this analysis as well. As it turns out this is likely to have been an artefact of other variables at play (e.g. education and age).

  14. We use quartiles as a cut-off point as they are relatively neutral and do not bias the visualization.

  15. In an additional descriptive analysis (not shown here), we found that people who completely disagreed with this statement were also far more likely to belong to the 25% most populist respondents (45 of 57 respondents scoring 1 − or: 77.5% of the them).

  16. Although the overlapping confidence intervals suggest that this difference is not significant (cf. Appendix 3).

  17. Robustness checks using a populism index whereby the six populism items are simply summed up reveal no substantial differences in the results.

  18. An analysis including preferences for national referendums (appendix 4) indeed suggests that referendums preferences have a strong impact on whether or not one voted in the referendum. The effect of populist attitudes is indeed smaller (and negative) in this analysis. This suggests referendum preferences mediate the effect of populist attitudes. However, the coefficient was not significant to begin with (and remained insignificant), so one should be cautious about reading too much into this finding.

  19. If we include this variable as a set of five dummies, it turns out that all categories were more likely to vote than voters who only have a primary school degree (p < 0.05), but the effect is non-linear: an analysis with squared education shows the positive effect of education slowly becomes smaller, though the effect remains positive. The explanation is that higher educated voters were more susceptible to the turnout quorum argument: if the 30% threshold was not cleared the referendum would be invalid. Given the polls (clear ‘No’-win) and given that the highest educated voters were more prone to vote ‘Yes’, staying at home to keep the turnout below the threshold was a serious option for the highest educated voters.

  20. Robustness checks using a populism index whereby the six populism items are simply summed up reveal no substantial differences in the results. Additional tests including even more political attitudes (Political Interest and External Political Efficacy) still reveal that populist attitudes has a significant effect (p < 0.001). Lastly, there is no multicollinearity between populist attitudes and external political efficacy, once again indicating that populist attitudes have an independent effect of referendum practices.

  21. The odds ratio of the variable constitutes an indication that the effect is not only significant, but also substantial: 3.063. Given that the factor scores depict standard deviations from the average, this means that respondents who are one standard deviation more populist are 3.063 times more likely to have voted ‘No’ in the referendum.

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Correspondence to Kristof Jacobs.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Descriptives of the main variables

See Tables 5 and 6.

Table 5 Descriptives relationship between populist attitudes and referendum preferences.
Table 6 Descriptives logistic regressions.

Appendix 2: OLS regressions on referendum preferences

 

Dependent variable

Preference national referendums

Referendums should be binding

Preference local referendums

Referendums are too expensive

(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

Populist attitudes

0.645***

0.651***

0.455***

− 0.145***

(0.025)

(0.025)

(0.027)

(0.029)

Net income

− 0.013

− 0.015

− 0.029**

− 0.005

(0.012)

(0.012)

(0.013)

(0.014)

Not living alone

− 0.041

0.053

0.048

− 0.017

(0.049)

(0.047)

(0.052)

(0.056)

Education

0.014

− 0.040**

0.013

− 0.030

(0.016)

(0.016)

(0.017)

(0.018)

Trust government (0–10)

− 0.015

− 0.029**

− 0.009

0.063***

(0.012)

(0.011)

(0.012)

(0.013)

Urban (5 cat)

− 0.026

0.006

− 0.041**

0.013

(0.016)

(0.015)

(0.017)

(0.018)

Age categories

− 0.089***

0.014

− 0.013

− 0.014

(0.014)

(0.014)

(0.015)

(0.016)

Man

− 0.019

0.050

0.008

− 0.254***

(0.044)

(0.043)

(0.048)

(0.051)

Constant

4.096***

3.567***

3.600***

3.580***

(0.129)

(0.126)

(0.139)

(0.148)

Observations

1803

1805

1777

1749

Log likelihood

−2271.236

− 2234.487

− 2352.686

− 2424.604

Akaike inf. crit.

4560.471

4486.975

4723.372

4867.208

  1. *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; **p < 0.01

Appendix 3

See Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Source NRO (2016)

a Bar chart voted in 2016 referendum. b Bar chart voting ‘No’. Note: 95% confidence intervals

Appendix 4: Populist attitudes and preference national referendums (logit regression)

 

Dependent variable: turning out to vote (= 1)

Populist attitudes

− 0.037 (0.083)

Preference for national referendums

0.191*** (0.066)

Net income

− 0.025 (0.033)

Education

0.076* (0.046)

Not living alone

0.106 (0.138)

Urban (5 cat)

0.013 (0.046)

Trust EU (0–10)

− 0.065 (0.043)

Trust government (0–10)

0.022 (0.044)

Trust Ukraine (0–10)

0.148*** (0.041)

Trust Russia (0–10)

0.545** (0.272)

Vote PVV

0.299 (0.194)

Vote SP

0.122 (0.193)

Age categories

0.204*** (0.042)

Man

0.013 (0.129)

Constant

− 2.462*** (0.593)

Observations

1341

Log likelihood

− 862.370

Akaike inf. crit.

1754.740

  1. *p < 0.1; **p < 0.05; ***p < 0.01

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Jacobs, K., Akkerman, A. & Zaslove, A. The voice of populist people? Referendum preferences, practices and populist attitudes. Acta Polit 53, 517–541 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-018-0105-1

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