‘The people = majority?’ Examining the relationship between populist attitudes and majoritarian decision-making preferences among adolescents

How do adolescents make trade-offs when it comes to democratic values? This is an important question because adolescents are the political participants of the future, and the attitudes they acquire early in life might well crystalize later. Adolescents grow up in a time when populist parties criticize political pluralism and propose the alternative of “extreme majoritarianism”. What are the consequences? In particular: do populist attitudes among adolescents fuel preferences for majoritarianism? Using a vignette study among 15- to 16-year olds, we examine this question and also assess whether the size of the majority influences the relationship between populism and decision-making preferences. Our results show no higher overall support for majoritarian decision-making among populist adolescents. However, the size of the majority does seem to matter for populist adolescents (and not for non-populists): populism is negatively related to majoritarian decision-making preferences when majorities are small, while no relationship exists when the majority is large. This means that populist adolescents differ from non-populist adolescents in a striking and unexpected way: when majorities are small, they do not turn out to be majoritarianists but consensus-builders. Yet they become more majoritarian when the size of the majority increases.