What is populism good for? An experimental test of mobilization effects

In recent decades, populist parties and candidates have gained increasing electoral support across the world. Despite this evident electoral success of populists, however, recent experimental studies find limited effects of populist rhetoric alone on vote choice. If such rhetoric is not effective in shaping voting preference, why would politicians adopt it, and what might explain the electoral success of populist candidates and parties? We argue that populism might influence elections through increasing turnout instead of or in addition to changing voters’ preference for candidates. However, existing conjoint and vignette survey experiments generally focus on forced candidate choice, which assumes full mobilization, potentially biasing the between-candidate choice estimates and missing abstention decisions important in real-world politics. To address this, we conducted a large-scale U.S. conjoint experiment of campaign messaging with an explicit abstention option to test for the possible mobilization effects of populism independent of persuasion effects and the various associated policy positions. Our results show that while populist rhetoric has limited persuasive impact, it can slightly increase mobilization, especially among voters who already hold populist views. Overall, however, voters’ alignment with candidates’ policy positions matters far more for both vote choice and turnout than the use of populist messaging itself.