Political Sophistication and Populist Party Support

Abstract

In this article, we investigate the moderating role of political sophistication on the vote for populist parties in Belgium. Building on the literature about the diverse determinants of populist party support, we investigate whether issue considerations and populism-related motivations play a bigger role in the electoral calculus of politically sophisticated voters.Using data from the 2019 general elections in Belgium, we focus on the cases of Vlaams Belang (VB) and Parti du Travail de Belgique-Partij van de Arbeid (PTB-PVDA). We find evidence suggesting that political sophistication enhances the impact of populism-related motivations on populist party support, although the effects are contingent on the party. Moreover, we show that, for issue considerations, the moderation effect only comes into play for VB voters: the impact of antiimmigrant considerations is greater at increasing levels of political sophistication.

Ideologically consistent, but for whom? An empirical assessment of the populism-elitism-pluralism set of attitudes and the moderating role of political sophistication

“…Replicating our central findings may also provide an opportunity to overcome some limitations of our article. Although we feel confident about our measure of (self-assessed) political sophistication, it would be better to also include measures that tap into factual political knowledge (Gallina et al, 2020), especially because we know that the difference between both (sometimes called ‘the illusion of knowing’) is higher among the less educated (Park, 2001). Furthermore, especially in contemporary highly mediatised societies, unravelling political sophistication by differentiating between being uninformed and misinformed would allow for a better insight as to the exact moderating mechanism (Van Kessel et al, 2020).…”

“…Indeed, Mudde (2004: 255), for example, called the former leader of the Flemish socialist party (SP) a populist. Gallina et al (2020) considers the electoral breakthrough of the (former communist) left-wing party PTB-PVDA as evidence of left-wing populism in Flanders or Belgium. PVDA voters also score as high on populist attitudes as well as VB voters (Elchardus and Spruyt, 2016).…”

“…They not only refer to the finding that factual knowledge is strongly correlated with other indicators of political awareness (Bartle, 2000: 41), but they also stress that interest, cognition, exposure, motivation, and performance interact and mutually reinforce each other. To cover such a broad conceptualisation of political sophistication, some scholars combine self-assessed measures with methods that assess factual political knowledge (Gallina et al, 2020; Lupton et al, 2015), or rely on people’s educational attainment (e.g. Enns and Kellstedt, 2008).…”

Political knowledge, media use and right-wing populist preferences

“…Stanley and Czesnik (2021) studied voters in Poland and found a strong association between populist attitudes and low political knowledge. Examining populist party support in the 2019 Belgian election, Gallina et al (2020) used the concept of political sophistication -consisting of political knowledge, participation, and interest -and found supporters of Vlaams Belang to be generally less sophisticated. Controlling for other factors, however, there was no direct effect of sophistication on populist vote choices.…”