Spierings, N., & Jacobs, K. (2025). How populist are ethnic minorities? Populist attitudes and voting for populist parties in the Netherlands. Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957251360109
Abstract:
With the rise of populist parties, literature has grown exploring who their voters are and suggesting ways to measure the support of (thin-centred) populist ideology among voters. However, it has yet to be fully assessed whether populist attitudes are also informative for understanding the voting behaviour of migrantized ethnic minorities, partly because of the opposition between such voters and the populist radical right (PRR). In this study, using unique ethnic-minority election survey data from the Dutch 2021 and 2023 elections, we assess whether populist attitudes also form a single scale among (different groups of) migrantized ethnic-minority voters; whether the concept is distinguishable from related but theoretically different concepts, such as trust and efficacy; and whether populist attitudes are related to voting for populist parties, including those of the radical right. We show that the items for populist attitudes generally load together on one distinctive factor. These attitudes also have additional explanatory power in explaining support for voting for PRR parties or for rather populist ethnic-minority interest parties – the latter seemingly crowding out support for populist parties among the left.