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A vast body of literature has demonstrated that the electoral appeal of populist parties is to a large extent determined by a hostile attitude toward the political elite, and a low level of trust in basic democratic institutions. However, in those instances where the populist candidates actually gain power (e.g., USA 2016-2020, Hungary, and Poland) one can observe that political trust is no longer associated with a vote for the populist party or candidate. This renders it all the more important to identify more correctly what populist voters actually dislike about the functioning of the political elite. It could be argued that when this was a general hostility toward government interference in their daily lives, this should remain the same, even when their own preferred party is in power. It is indeed clear that when populists do gain power, this does not lead to a reduction in the role of government in regulating society. Our theoretical question, therefore, is to determine what exactly populist voters do not like about the functioning of the political elite.
The literature allows us to assume that various elements play a role here: alleged corruption scandals (Uslaner, 2008), the high socio-economic status of political elites (Bovens & Wille, 2017), the standard practice of reaching compromise among political elites, and the polarization among political leaders. While all these elements have been included in the literature, thus far there is not much empirical research about what exactly populist voters do not like about the current political institutions. As far as more standardized indicators allow us to judge, there is no evidence for a decline of the quality of government in liberal democracies. This would imply that low levels of political trusts are not necessarily evaluation-based. In this paper, we use a new innovative questionnaire battery that has been included in the 5th module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) dataset of electoral surveys. In this questionnaire that has been used since 2016, and is now available for 45 different countries, various new survey items were included in order to assess what exactly is being disliked in the functioning of political elites and institutions. These include corruption practices, compromise seeking, adherence to the rule of law, polarization, a lack of respect for the rule of law, ideological positions, and other items. Rather surprisingly, a preliminary analysis of the dataset of the 5th module of CSES suggest that in fact all of these items, even if they are to a large extent contradictory, can lead to a populist vote. E.g., both seeking compromise, as the level of political polarization, seem associated with low levels of political trust and a preference for populist challengers. This would suggest there is no straightforward manner for current political elites to react to the upswing of populist sentiments among the electorate. In the conclusion, we reflect on what this implies for the more structural question of the governability of liberal democracy.
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