Populist Attitudes: Bringing Together Ideational and Communicative Approaches
| Author | Glenn Kefford,Benjamin Moffitt,Annika Werner |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721997741 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721997741
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(4) 1006 –1027
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721997741
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Populist Attitudes: Bringing
Together Ideational and
Communicative Approaches
Glenn Kefford1, Benjamin Moffitt2
and Annika Werner3
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.
Keywords
populism, political attitudes, voting behaviour, political communication, Australia
Accepted: 3 February 2021
If there is one phenomenon that has captured the attention of political scientists in recent
years, it is surely populism. Following the twin 2016 shocks of the election of Donald
Trump and the outcome of the Brexit referendum, the already sizeable literature on pop-
ulism has grown exponentially, with the analysis of new cases, significant conceptual
development and new methodologies being applied to the phenomenon. Indeed, this
1School of Political Science & International Studies, The University of Queensland, Saint Lucia, QLD,
Australia
2National School of Arts, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
3School of Politics and International Relations, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
Corresponding author:
Glenn Kefford, School of Political Science & International Studies, The University of Queensland, Saint Lucia,
QLD 4072, Australia.
Email: g.kefford@uq.edu.au
997741PSX0010.1177/0032321721997741Political StudiesKeord et al.
research-article2021
Article
Kefford et al. 1007
growth has been so significant that one can now credibly speak of ‘populism studies’ as a
distinct subfield.
Arguably, the most significant area of study to emerge in recent years in populism
studies has been the body of work on populist attitudes. While traditionally research on
populism has analysed so-called ‘supply-side’ aspects of the phenomenon, focussing on
populist leaders, parties and movements, the populist attitudes literature instead focusses
on ‘demand-side’ explanations of the phenomenon, specifically examining how citizens
may hold populist views, and how this may (or may not) correlate with their electoral
behaviour. These insights are (usually) garnered via large-scale surveys. The assumption
underlying this literature is that populism is an ideational phenomenon – that is, a set of
beliefs, however ‘thin’ or underdeveloped, about the relationship between ‘the people’
and ‘the elite’. Whether individuals hold these attitudes ‘latently’ – that is, unconsciously
and thus allegedly waiting for ‘activation’ from such populist actors – or consciously is
still a matter of debate (Hawkins et al., 2018b).
It is understandable why the ideational approach to populism has served as the basis
for the burgeoning populist attitudes literature – it is arguably the most widely used and
hegemonic in the academic literature on the topic, and an understanding of populism as a
particular type of worldview, set of beliefs or ideology accords very well with the notion
of political attitudes more broadly. Yet this approach has its limits: it is unable to provide
answers as to why individuals with populist attitudes would vote for populist parties or
candidates beyond the weak assumption of ‘thin’ ideological overlap. For example, such
approaches overlook the potential effect of populism’s communicative, performative and
discursive appeal, which are central in a significant amount of the literature on the phe-
nomenon (Laclau, 2005; Moffitt, 2016; Ostiguy, 2017; Stavrakakis, 2017), as well as
preferences for particular modes of political representation, which again have been cited
as core to understanding populism (Roberts, 2015; Urbinati, 2019; Werner and Giebler,
2019).
In this light, this article argues that measures of populist attitudes can and should con-
sider populism’s communicative appeal. We argue that it is useful to analyse how existing
measures of populist attitudes (which we call ‘populist ideational attitudes’, in line with
the ideational approach favoured by the extant literature) interact with measures of pref-
erences for a populist mode of discourse, communication or style (which we call ‘atti-
tudes towards populist communication’), with the view towards gaining a more cohesive
and holistic picture of how populist attitudes operate in future studies. In order to do this,
we fielded an online survey of 1049 Australians asking them questions not only about
their populist ideational attitudes in line with work done elsewhere by authors associated
with the ‘Team Populism’ project (Castanho Silva et al., 2018; Hawkins et al., 2018a) but
also adding original items to tap attitudes towards populist communication.1 In doing so,
we test whether attitudes towards populist communication exist distinctly to populist
ideational attitudes, if and how they correlate with one another, whether such attitudes
correlate with voting for a populist party and how attitudes towards populist communica-
tion correlate with education levels and generational cohorts.
The article is structured as follows. We first provide an overview of the extant litera-
ture on measuring populist ideational attitudes, before turning to the literature on populist
communication, and explaining how these literatures can be brought into discussion with
one another. Second, we outline our hypotheses around attitudes towards populist com-
munication. Third, we discuss our methodological strategy, research design, data and the
choice of Australia as our case. The fourth section, our results and analysis, shows that
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