SS-22 Correlation Between Attitudes Towards Out-Groups and Populist Voting

The democratic paradox is inevitable in representative democracy, which means that populism will occur. Given the rise in populism in advanced democracies over the past 15 years it is important to understand what attitudes drive citizens to vote for populist candidates and parties. I will be focusing on the impact that attitudes towards out-groups and elites have on populist voting to further understand the effects of populism. Using the data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) – Module 5, I compared the variables that included attitudes towards out-groups and populist voting. According to the results, as people become more tolerant of out-groups, populist voting decreases. The results also show that the odds of populist voting increase by .87 as positive attitudes towards out-groups rise. Since the odds ratio is less than one, then it is a negative relationship which means as tolerance rises, populist vote would decrease. These findings show that attitudes toward out-groups does have an effect on populist voting. The data shows that there may be a small effect on this large dataset that scales from 1-16, but in further research I think that a greater effect could be shown. The limitations in my findings are that the dataset is on a large scale and if narrowed down, may provide more accurate and useable results. The application of this research is to further understand the dangers that populism may bring to the legitimacy of democratic elections.