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How ideology shapes the relationship between populist attitudes and support for liberal democratic values. Evidence from Spain

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Abstract

In this paper, I argue that ideology has a moderating role on how populist attitudes shape support for three liberal democratic values: the separation of powers, the granting of civil liberties and the protection of the rights of minorities. Drawing on insights gleaned from the political theory and comparative politics literature, and using an ideational approach to populism, I suggest that leftist and rightist populist individuals’ different understandings of what constitutes the people shape their stances towards democracy. Using data from Spain (N = 3000), I show that right-wing populist individuals display lower levels of support for the granting of civil liberties and the protection of the rights of minorities than their non-populist peers. As for left-wing individuals, populist attitudes are unrelated to the rights of minorities, positively related to the granting of civil rights, and also positively related to some aspects of the separation of powers. The evidence reveals that right-wing populists endorse principles of liberal democracy less strongly compared to non-populist right-wing individuals and to left-wing individuals, and it has important implications on how to understand and tackle populism in modern democracies.

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Notes

  1. Remarkably, these three are not the unique values defining neither a liberal democratic regime nor sufficient elements for a system to be considered a democracy. For instance, the V-Dem Liberal Democratic Index (Lührmann et al., 2020) provides other defining factors of a liberal democratic regime such as the presence of a rigorous and impartial public administration, transparent laws with predictable enforcement, property rights, freedom from torture, political killing or forced labour, freedom of movement and religion, compliance with judiciary, the existence of opposition parties or the executive oversight, among others. Furtherore, other conceptions of democracy make emphasis in alternative defining elements of democracy. In sum, it is important to highlight that neither democracy nor democratic values are restricted to the three components addressed in this piece.

  2. Replication materials can be found at Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/C1DR0N.

  3. The used sample is representative of the Spanish adult population until 65 years old. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to believe that the evidence had individuals older than 65 years old been included would have been similar to the one found in the paper. I discuss these arguments in Appendix F in the Online Supporting Materials.

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  1. Faculty of Law and Political Science, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Marc Guinjoan

  2. Institutions and Political Economy research Group (IPErG), Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Marc Guinjoan

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Guinjoan, M. How ideology shapes the relationship between populist attitudes and support for liberal democratic values. Evidence from Spain. Acta Polit 58, 401–423 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-022-00252-9

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