Callum Tindall and Siim Trumm use data from the Representative Audit of Britain Survey to explore how strong different types of populist attitudes are among parliamentary candidates. They find that, when it comes to predicting the strength of populist attitudes, party affiliation and political experience are key factors.

Rising support for populist parties and candidates has been a key story of recent decades in Western democracies and beyond. Although Britain has historically lacked populist traditions like those prominent in countries like Italy, there is increasing attention to populism also here, with examples of both left- and right-wing populism arguably present. This is primarily seen in outsider parties like the UK Independence Party (UKIP), but was also a feature of the leaderships of Jeremy Corbyn and Boris Johnson, and the 2016 EU referendum heightened populist divisions by revealing a divide between the “left behind” and the political elites. Populism has become very much part of British political discourse.

Anti-elite sentiments

There is a lot of variation in the extent to which parliamentary candidates hold populist views. We use data from the Representative Audit of Britain Survey to describe the strength of populist sentiments – in terms of being pro-people, elite antagonism, and popular sovereignty – among candidates who ran in the 2015 and 2017 General Elections. In general, populist sentiments tend to be weakest on the pro-people dimension. Only 15.4 per cent of candidates agree or strongly agree that it is voters, not Parliament, who should make final decisions on law and policy, while roughly one in four (25.4 per cent) believe that people, not politicians, should make the most important policy decisions. A majority believe that citizens should be able to initiate referendums, but it is very marginal, at 51.1 per cent.

The strongest populist views tend to be on the anti-elitism dimension. More than three in four (78.8 per cent) candidates believe that ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth, with 71.6 per cent agreeing or strongly agreeing that big business takes advantage of ordinary people, and almost two thirds (66.1 per cent) believing that there is one law for the rich and one law for the poor. With regards to the popular sovereignty dimension, the standout perception is that special interests have too much influence on legislation. More than three in four (76.9 per cent) candidates agree or strongly agree with that sentiment.

Table 1. Populist attitudes

Green populism?

Partisanship appears to matter a lot when it comes to explaining the strength of populist attitudes. It is the Green Party candidates who tend to hold the strongest populist sentiments. Their mean scores for anti-elitism and popular sovereignty dimensions – 4.31 and 4.20, respectively – are higher than those for candidates of all other parties, while their mean score on the pro-people dimension (3.16) is exceeded only by UKIP candidates (3.61).

At the other end of the spectrum are Conservative Party candidates who tend to hold the least populist attitudes. Their mean scores on the anti-elitism and popular sovereignty dimensions – 2.37 and 2.47, respectively – are significantly lower than the corresponding scores for all other parties, while their mean score on the pro-people dimension (2.21) is lower than the corresponding scores for all other parties except the Labour Party (2.16). Moreover, the Conservative Party is the only party focused on here whose candidates have mean scores closer to the minimum (1) than the maximum (5) on all three dimensions. They do not tend to believe that people should take primacy when it comes to making policy decision. They are also much less inclined to believe that the (economic and political) system is not working for ordinary people than candidates of the other parties.

Table 2. Populist attitudes by party

Political experience as a predicting factor

We also looked at the potential relevance of various other characteristics in explaining the strength of candidates’ populist views.

Political experience stands out here. Challengers hold significantly stronger populist attitudes than incumbents on all three dimensions, while candidates who have not been local councillors hold significantly stronger populist pro-people and popular sovereignty views than those who have. Taken together, it is candidates who have previously held elected office who tend to hold weaker populist sentiments.

Table 3. Explaining variation in populist sentiments

The story emerging from our findings is rather intriguing. While a lot of attention is given to populism in political discourse and high-profile examples of both populist parties and leaders are relatively easy to find, populist attitudes do not appear to be particularly prominent when looking beyond those who tend to dominate the political landscape and news cycles. At the candidate level, while populist views are present and should by no means be discarded as immaterial, they do not stand out as being very strong or consistent across the different types of populist attitudes. Voters are exposed to populist messages by many political parties and leaders, but it does seem that parliamentary candidates, generally, are not at the forefront of the rise of populism.

This post draws on the authors’ published work in British Politics.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: photo by Michael Vadon, Creative Commons — Attribution 2.0 Generic — CC BY 2.0