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2020 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

Populist Politicians: Populism, Democratic Dissatisfaction and the Perception of Representation. The Case of Greece

verfasst von : Marcel Lewandowsky

Erschienen in: Continuity and Change of Party Democracies in Europe

Verlag: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

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Abstract

This article investigates populism as an attitude of political elites. Based on an extensive discussion of research on populism, it develops a concept that harmonizes the role perceptions of political elites in representative democracies with dissatisfaction as an evaluative and populism as a specific normative orientation towards democracy. Based on candidate data of the 2015 Greek parliamentary election, this contribution offers an empirical analysis of the linkage between dissatisfaction with democracy, role perceptions and populism. Finally, implications for further research are discussed in detail.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Democracy Reform as a Populist Policy Supply

Nächstes Kapitel No Need for Wider Selectorates? Party Members’ Preferences for Reforming the Nomination of District and List Candidates for the German Bundestag

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When interpreting the findings, it should be noted that the values of the variables are relatively distorted. For example, about 68.6% of the candidates in the sample are male and 31.4% are female. The level of education is even more skewed. 5.75% of candidates have primary or secondary education and 8.62% have a medium formal education. In contrast, 85.63% with university education represent the clear majority in the dataset. Even though the level of education of political elites is generally higher than the population average, this may have implications for the later analysis, which will then need to be discussed.

In detail, Fishbein (1963, p. 234) suggests defining attitudes with the following function:

\({\text{Attitude}}\;{\text{towards}}\;{\text{an}}\;{\text{object}} = \mathop \sum \limits_{i = 1}^{N} B_{i} a_{i}\)

B_i is the strength of the specific belief that an individual connects with an object. a_i represents the evaluation of this related object. The sum of the multiplications of B and a defines the attitude towards the object (Schumann 2014, pp. 600–601). Nevertheless, I have to assume that the items—since they address and evaluate objects—are equivalent to this multiplicative logic.

The distribution in terms of understanding of role can be found in Table A4 in the “Appendix”. It turns out that candidates who in case of conflict tend to take the position of voters rather than their party or their own are in the minority in all parties. Only the populist radical right ANEL is an exception. Here, those who would take the position of voters are clearly in the majority.

A surprising finding is that very satisfied candidates are also rather populist. However, while one could argue that this result supports the finding that populist candidates can indeed be satisfied with democracy, it must be noted once more that this category includes only three respondents. Thus, it appears to be a statistical artefact and I suggest not to draw any further conclusions from this specific finding.

To verify this at the descriptive level, the appendix contains histograms showing the distribution of populist attitudes for each party (Fig. A1).

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Titel: Populist Politicians: Populism, Democratic Dissatisfaction and the Perception of Representation. The Case of Greece
verfasst von: Marcel Lewandowsky
Verlag: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
Buch: Continuity and Change of Party Democracies in Europe
Print ISBN: 978-3-658-28987-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-658-28988-1

Copyright-Jahr: 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28988-1_9