ABSTRACT
Recent advances in the study of populism, particularly at the individual level, have conclusively demonstrated the importance of elite framing for activating and directing latent populist attitudes among the electorate. Ideational work in this vein however, has yet to explain exactly how policy failure and the political context also incentivize populist behavior. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of normative democratic threat, that is, a threat to the basic norms of democracy from political elites who engage in widespread, intentional misconduct. We expect that policy failures that result from intentional misconduct are more likely to trigger a populist response than those resulting from negligence or external causes, and that such a response is likely to be greater when this type of corruption is endemic. We tested these theoretical expectations in two laboratory-based experiments: one on a student sample at Northwestern University in the United States, the other on a mixed student/resident sample at Oxford University in the United Kingdom. Our results are mixed. At Northwestern, our subjects who received the treatment are more likely to exhibit populist behavior; in contrast, at Oxford, the effects are more muted and confined primarily to non-students in the sample. Nevertheless, we believe that our experiments have important implications for future research. We introduce new outcome measures for lab-based experiments of this kind, and secondly, our results raise questions about the importance of sample homogeneity and local context when examining populist behavior in the lab.
