Only in the United States do neither type of populist attitudes predict support for a populist strongman leader like Trump. Trump’s support has been attributed to a complex interplay of factors, including racial resentment, economic grievances, and anti-immigration sentiment.

Anti-establishment versus authoritarian populists and support for the strong(wo)man

Frontiers in Political Science

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.

**Only in the United States do neither type of populist attitudes predict support for a populist leader—an outcome that is perhaps our most unexpected, given that Trump epitomizes the archetype of a populist strongman. However, Trump’s support in the 2016 election has been attributed to a complex interplay of factors, including racial resentment (Tolbert et al., 2018), economic grievances (Ferguson et al., 2020), and anti-immigration sentiment (Donovan and Redlawsk, 2018)**. These findings align with Inglehart and Norris’s (2017) cultural backlash thesis, which suggests that support for Trump reflects a defensive reaction against rapid social change and perceived erosion of traditional values. In such contexts, strongman appeals resonate not because of populist attitudes, but because they promise to restore a familiar moral and cultural order. Recent findings by Dai and Kustov (2024) similarly demonstrate that during the 2016 American elections, Trump’s populist rhetoric did not resonate as strongly with voters exhibiting populist attitudes. Instead, his electoral appeal was more closely tied to his perceived moderation on economic issues and his hardline stance on immigration.

No doubt because it’s a manufactured mix, like a lab experiment. We were controlled by racist landowners from the very start.