Populism and Candidate Support in the US: The Effects of Thin and Host Ideology

Much of the contemporary literature on populism focuses on its status as a thin ideology comprising three key components: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and anti-pluralism. Populist politicians pair this thin ideology with extreme positions on policy issues such as immigration or taxation (referred to as host or thick ideologies). A recent study using German samples leveraged conjoint experiments to disentangle the effects of these appeals on vote choice. The results not only showed that extreme host-ideological positions mattered more than so-called thin populist appeals, but also that effects of populist appeals were nearly identical among populist and non-populist voters. Our replication in the US context reaffirms both the importance of host-ideological positions and the lack of heterogeneous effects by voters'thin populist attitudes. Furthermore, by uncovering some divergence from the German case (e.g. anti-elite appeals trumping people-centric appeals), we highlight the need to experimentally examine the effects of populism's constituent components across contexts.