A Populist Axis? Analyzing Connections Between Populist, Economic, and Cultural Dimensions of Political Space

What makes populist parties successful? What is the contribution of populist ideas to their appeal? How do they affect a voter’s choice? In this article, we treat populist orientation as just another dimension of spatial competition alongside economic and cultural dimensions, and assess its influence on vote choice. Using survey data from nine countries, we place voters and parties along the populist, economic, and cultural dimensions and estimate a spatial model of vote choice. We find that voters’ populist orientations are negatively correlated with their pro-market orientation and positively correlated with their cultural conservatism. We also find that proximity along the populist dimension has a tangible, albeit varying, weight in vote choice. This means that populist appeal can pull populist voters toward populist parties (and non-populist voters toward non-populist parties) even if they do not perfectly align with them on economic and cultural dimensions.