Anti-establishment versus authoritarian populists and support for the strong(wo)man
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to the growing demand-side literature on populism by investigating how different types of populist attitudes shape support for strongman leaders. By capitalizing on popular discontent with the political establishment, populist leaders often ascend to power through democratic means, only to consolidate authority and weaken the very institutions that facilitated their rise. We argue that a major obstacle to understanding populist support lies in the tendency to treat populist attitudes as a single, monolithic construct. Dominated by the ideational approach, much of the existing literature neglects the role of the populist strongman and offers only limited conceptual clarity on authoritarian populism—particularly at the attitudinal level. To address this gap, we develop a more refined framework that moves beyond the standard definitional elements of the ideational model, demonstrating that populist attitudes consist of two distinct varieties. Using novel survey data from nine countries, we conduct a factor analysis that consistently reveals two components: one capturing anti-elitism and people-centrism (anti-establishment populism), and another reflecting majoritarianism, support for strongman rule, elitism, and exclusive nationalism (authoritarian populism). This underscores that the appeal of populist strongmen is rooted not in democratic ideals, but rather in the allure of authoritarian governance. Our findings show that in six countries—Italy, Hungary, Poland, Spain, Brazil, and Argentina—support for populist leaders is primarily driven by authoritarian populist attitudes. In contrast, anti-establishment populism emerges as the dominant factor only in France and Canada, while neither dimension has a significant effect in the United States.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".