Publication details
The Role of Political Sophistication in Populist Support throughout Election Campaign
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| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | Background: Existing research suggests that populist parties gain votes from informed rather than uninformed populist citizens, thus challenging the notion of populism as ‘politics for stupid people’. However, close to elections, simple populist messages may find support among politically unsophisticated individuals and consequently overshadow the moderating effect of political sophistication on the relationship between populist attitudes and populist electoral support. Purpose: To address this research gap we explore the role of political sophistication in populist support at different stages of election campaign. We specifically examine which factors pull people with different levels of political sophistication towards populist parties, focusing particularly on issue preferences and leader-related factors. Throughout election campaign, we expect politically unsophisticated individuals to be attracted to populist parties rather through leader-related factors and to be less inclined to act upon their policy preferences due to lower complexity of their reasoning. Method: We test these assumptions within the context of the 2021 Czech legislative election in which populist cleavage held a prominent position, using panel data from our online nationally representative two-wave quota survey (N = 1181). More specifically, we run a series of multi-group SEM analyses with political sophistication as the grouping variable, taking advantage of different operationalisations of political sophistication. Conclusions: Despite being limited to the Czech context, our paper contributes to better understanding of the role of political sophistication in populist support by evaluating to what extent and through which factors populist parties attract politically (un)sophisticated individuals. |
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