2022 Theses Bachelor's

Populist Ideology and Electoral Success: A Comparative Analysis of the Tea Party and the Trump Campaign as Populist Movements

Ko, JiHoon

This study analyzes the Tea Party and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election campaign as populist electoral movements, with a specific focus on how these movements’ particular styles of populism impacted their respective electoral success. The ideal type of populism, as developed by Andrew Arato and Jean Cohen in Populism and Civil Society, provides a framework for constructing models of these two populist movements and identifying four key ideological and discursive differences between the two. These four differences concern these movements’ methods of constructing a conception of “the people,” anti-elitism, host ideology, and reliance on a central leader. Statistical analysis indicates that these differences do help to explain the differential electoral success of these movements.