Populism and the liberal international order: An analysis of UN voting patterns

Abstract

Populism is often assumed to undermine the liberal world order, but this claim has never been tested systematically. In this study, we do so for the first time. Based on an understanding of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” entailing anti-elitism and people-centrism, we expect populist governments to have foreign policy preferences opposed to the core features of the US-led liberal international order. Our empirical analysis assesses government preferences on the liberal international order as expressed through UN General Assembly votes. Our findings support the expectation that populism has a strong and statistically significant negative impact on foreign policy preferences related to the core norms of the liberal international order. Moreover, we find that populists with a left-wing ideology and those in less democratic countries tend to be more opposed to the US-led liberal international order. However, populist governments do not reject the UNGA as such, as they are not more likely to be absent from UNGA votes than other states. Thereby, this study makes a contribution both to the burgeoning literature on the international implications of populism and to debates on the crisis of the liberal order.

Full text

Vol.:(0123456789)
The Review of International Organizations
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-024-09569-w
Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis
ofUN voting patterns
SandraDestradi1,2 · JohannesVüllers3
Accepted: 30 August 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
Abstract
Populism is often assumed to undermine the liberal world order, but this claim has
never been tested systematically. In this study, we do so for the first time. Based on
an understanding of populism as a “thin-centered ideology” entailing anti-elitism and
people-centrism, we expect populist governments to have foreign policy preferences
opposed to the core features of the US-led liberal international order. Our empiri-
cal analysis assesses government preferences on the liberal international order as
expressed through UN General Assembly votes. Our findings support the expecta-
tion that populism has a strong and statistically significant negative impact on foreign
policy preferences related to the core norms of the liberal international order. Moreo-
ver, we find that populists with a left-wing ideology and those in less democratic
countries tend to be more opposed to the US-led liberal international order. However,
populist governments do not reject the UNGA as such, as they are not more likely to
be absent from UNGA votes than other states. Thereby, this study makes a contribu-
tion both to the burgeoning literature on the international implications of populism
and to debates on the crisis of the liberal order.
Keywords Populism· United Nations· UNGA voting patterns· Liberal international
order· International impact of populism
Responsible Editor: Axel Dreher
* Sandra Destradi
sandra.destradi@politik.uni-freiburg.de
Johannes Vüllers
johannes.vuellers@uni-due.de
1 Chair forInternational Relations, University ofFreiburg, Rempartstr. 15, 79085Freiburg,
Germany
2 Lauder School ofGovernment, Diplomacy andStrategy, Reichman University, 8 Ha’universita
Street, 4610101Herzliya, Israel
3 Faculty ofSocial Sciences, University ofDuisburg-Essen, Institute forDevelopment andPeace,
47048Duisburg, Germany
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
JEL Classification F50· F53· F55
1 Introduction
Populism is frequently mentioned as one of the main sources of the current crisis
of the liberal international order (LIO). According to this narrative, the liberal
order has not just been endangered by the rise of China, the resurgence of Rus-
sia, and the emergence of other great powers that are challenging some of its core
principles; it has also been weakened by the formation of populist governments
and the diffusion of populist ideas (Adler-Nissen & Zarakol, 2021; Börzel &
Zürn, 2021, p. 2; Colgan & Keohane, 2017; Jahn, 2018; Lake etal., 2021). Popu-
lists are considered to have made it their main objective to target and dismantle
the achievements of liberal internationalism (Jahn, 2018). If we follow this inter-
pretation, the success of populist parties in many countries has made populism
one of the most important forces in world politics, able to call into question – and
even to undermine – the core values permeating the international order.
With this study, we aim to empirically test this claim. While the study of pop-
ulism has long been a prerogative of Comparative Politics and Political Theory,
which have focused on the domestic causes and consequences of this phenom-
enon (see, among many others, Gidron & Hall, 2020; Kaltwasser & Taggart,
2016; Noury & Roland, 2020; Rooduijn, 2018; Vüllers & Hellmeier, 2021), the
international consequences of the global rise of populism have long been an
understudied issue. In recent years, however, a burgeoning literature has emerged,
which asks how populism impacts foreign policy and international politics, but
mostly focusing on single case studies or small-N comparisons of populist for-
eign policies (e.g., Chryssogelos, 2017; Destradi & Plagemann, 2019; Plagemann
and Destradi, 2019; Verbeek & Zaslove, 2015, 2017) or by addressing populist
communication and discourse in international politics (e.g., Lacatus & Meibauer,
2022; Wojczewski, 2023), or the personality traits of single leaders (e.g., Fou-
quet & Brummer, 2023; Thiers & Wehner, 2022). The very claim that populism
undermines the liberal international order is mostly based on insights from the
United States under President Trump and on the study of few other Western cases
of (mostly right-wing) populism (Börzel & Zürn, 2021; Jahn, 2018). By focus-
ing on such cases, the literature underscores that populism has undermined the
liberal international order from within. Söderbaum etal. (2021) directly address
populists’ contestation of the liberal international order, arguing that populist
governments might not necessarily reject all elements of the liberal international
order, but that they tend to instill illiberal elements into multilateral cooperation,
thereby promoting an alternative order in a more subtle way. Recent research on
populist attitudes reveals that populist voters are much more skeptical of inter-
national organizations as compared to non-populist ones (Kiratli & Schlipphak,
2024). However, there still is a substantial gap in the literature when it comes to
systematically assessing the broader impact of populism on governments’ foreign
policy preferences vis-à-vis the liberal international order.
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
This article aims to address this gap. To do so, it develops expectations about
how populism translates into foreign policy preferences related to the liberal
international order based on an understanding of populism as a “thin-centered
ideology” that entails two constitutive dimensions: anti-elitism and people-
centrism (Mudde, 2004). Based on such ideology, populist governments can be
expected to develop foreign policy preferences opposed to the core features of the
US-led LIO (Ikenberry, 2009). Anti-elitism will lead to a high degree of skepti-
cism vis-à-vis elitist multilateral institutions and transnational bureaucracies, an
increasingly open and globalized economy promoted by far-away economic elites,
and the promotion of democracy and human rights at the hands of actors under-
stood as detached from the “true people.” Following the people-centrism dimen-
sion of populism, the principles of the liberal order are not desirable because they
impinge on popular sovereignty (Chryssogelos, 2017) and weaken the direct links
between populist leaders and the “true people.”
To test these propositions, we focus on voting in the UN General Assembly
(UNGA), which has long been used as the best source to create measures of state
preferences. We rely on a data set by Bailey etal. (2017), which estimates state ideal
points on a dimension that reflects countries’ positions towards the US-led LIO. To
test the general willingness of populists to undermine multilateral organizations,
we also examine whether populist governments are more likely to be absent from
UNGA votes and thus refuse to participate in the UNGA. We combine the UNGA
voting data with a new measure for populist governments, based on an expert survey
of the level of populism of governing parties by the V-Dem project (Lührmannet
al., 2020). This data allows us to investigate to what extent more populist govern-
ments were more likely to vote against the US-led LIO in the UNGA for most coun-
tries in the world from 1975 to 2015.
The result of our analysis is straightforward: the negative impact of populism on
foreign policy preferences related to the US-led liberal international order is strong
and statistically significant. This effect is robust to the inclusion of an exhaustive
list of confounding variables and alternative measures. Looking at different features
of populist governments, we found in line with our expectations (i) that left-wing
populists are more likely to reject the US-led LIO, and (ii) that populists in less
democratic countries are more likely to reject the US-led LIO than populists in more
democratic ones. Finally, we found no evidence that populist governments reject the
UNGA as an international organ as such, as they are not more likely to be absent
from UNGA votes than other states. Thus, while populists are opposed to the tenets
of liberalism and to US influence, they continue to participate in and to support UN
processes.
Our findings have several important implications for the existing literature. For
one, we find empirical support for the widespread assumption that populism leads
to a rejection of the core principles of the US-led liberal international order. By
extension, we are also able to show systematically that populism does indeed have
an impact on foreign policy preferences. Thereby, our analysis makes a contribu-
tion both to the literature on the crisis of the liberal international order and to the
literature on the international consequences of populism. It also opens up avenues
for further research on the impact of populism on multilateral cooperation and
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
international regimes, on global public goods provision, or on normative change in
world politics.
This article proceeds as follows: first of all, we discuss the state of the art on the
international implications of populism. We then outline our understanding of pop-
ulism as well as the core components of the US-led liberal international order. On
that basis, we explain the theoretical link between populism and a rejection of such
order. In the following section, we outline our empirical strategy. Finally, we present
our empirical results and conclude by drafting a research agenda on the international
consequences of populism.
2 The international implications ofpopulism
The literature on populism has long acknowledged that populism is not a purely
domestic phenomenon detached from world politics. Indeed, studies on the causes
of populism have highlighted that deep-seated fears about the negative implica-
tions of globalization have been among the drivers of the success of populist parties
(Algan etal., 2017; Norris & Inglehart, 2019). Nevertheless, the study of populism
has long been a domain of Comparative Politics and Political Theory. Only over the
past few years has a small but rapidly growing community of scholars in the fields
of International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis started asking how populism
influences international politics (Wajner & Giurlando, 2024). Some studies have
made first efforts at theorizing the impact of populism on conflict behavior, on the
readiness to contribute to global governance, or on the processes of foreign policy
decision making (Chryssogelos, 2017; Destradi & Plagemann, 2019; Plagemann and
Destradi, 2019; Wajner, 2021; see alsoWajner etal., 2024; and the recent edited vol-
ume by Giurlando & Wajner, 2023). Others have addressed issues like specific popu-
list leaders’ foreign policy role conceptions (Wehner & Thies, 2020) or their rhetoric
and discourse on international matters (Lacatus etal., 2023; on US President Trump,
see Boucher & Thies, 2019; Lacatus, 2021; on Iranian leaders, see Holliday, 2019;
on Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez, see Sagarzazu & Thies, 2019; on Poland’s Law
and Justice government, see Cadier & Szulecki, 2020). Moreover, some studies have
delved deeper into populists’ attitudes towards specific actors or issues in interna-
tional politics, including their skepticism of international courts and multilateralism
(Voeten, 2020, 2021; Copelovitch & Pevehouse, 2019) or their approach to interna-
tional cooperation in the COVID-19 pandemic (Pevehouse, 2020).
This literature has led to a range of interesting insights, but disagreements persist
over whether populism can be expected to have an impact on foreign policy and on
whether there is anything like a genuinely “populist foreign policy.” According to
Moravcsik (2018, 1663), in Europe “populists have had surprisingly little effects on
EU policies,” except for the issue of migration. Other scholars have highlighted that
populist parties’ preferences about foreign policy issues depend primarily on their
“thick ideology” (Mudde, 2004, see below) and not so much on populism. Accord-
ing to this argument, left-wing populists will have very different preferences on
matters like trade or regional integration as opposed to radical right or “regionalist”
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
populists (Verbeek & Zaslove, 2017). By contrast, other authors have argued that
there is, indeed, something like a “populist foreign policy,” but that the impact of
populism on foreign policy is mediated by more procedural aspects of foreign-policy
making (Destradi & Plagemann, 2019, 2024).
Yet, overall, we still lack any systematic conclusions about the broader impact
of populism on world politics and the current international order. This lack of sys-
tematic analyses might have been due, among other things, to an absence of datasets
measuring populism worldwide over longer time periods.1 With our analysis, we
address this gap and we show that populism has a strong and statistically significant
impact on foreign policy preferences vis-à-vis the predominant norms of interna-
tional politics, that is, vis-à-vis the US-led liberal international order.
3 Populism andtheliberal international order
A large part of the literature in International Relations concurs in characterizing
the current world order as “liberal” and in highlighting the centrality of the United
States, or the “West” more broadly, in such order (Ikenberry, 2018). In the follow-
ing, we will refer to the US-led liberal international order2 to characterize the inter-
national order of the past decades, with the end of the Cold War and the expansion
of the liberal order to a truly global scale being the main turning point (Börzel &
Zürn, 2021; Ikenberry, 2009). Among the core principles of such order are a prefer-
ence for multilateralism, for the global spreading of liberal values and institutions,
especially representative democracy and human rights, and for economic openness
(Ikenberry, 2018; Stephen & Skidmore, 2019). These elements are deeply inter-
twined and thereby make the liberal international order, as Ikenberry (2009, 71)
puts it, “an evolving order marked by increasingly far-reaching and complex forms
of international cooperation that erode state sovereignty and reallocate on a global
scale the sites and sources of political authority.”
How does populism relate to this US-led liberal international order? In this con-
tribution, we follow the currently most widespread definition of populism, which
considers populism a “thin-centered ideology” (Mudde, 2004), that is, a rather lim-
ited set of ideas usually coexisting with a full-fledged “thick-ideology” like social-
ism or Hindu-nationalism. Populism “considers society to be ultimately separated
into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the cor-
rupt elite’, and […] argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté géné-
rale (general will) of the people” (Mudde, 2004: 543, emphasis removed). Anti-elit-
ism and the centrality of the people can therefore be considered the two constitutive
components of populism. The opposition between them is usually depicted in highly
moralistic terms, as a clear-cut dichotomy between good and evil (Hawkins, 2009,
1 For data on populist discourse by selected leaders, see Hawkinset al. (2019). On European parties,
see Huber and Ruth (2017), Rooduijnet al.(2023a, 2023b) ; on populist presidents in Latin America, see
Ruth (2018).
2 See below a discussion of how focusing on support for a US-led order differs from focusing on an
alignment with the US.
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
1043–44; Mudde, 2004, p. 543). Other authors also highlight that populist leaders
claim that they embody the popular will, that “they, and they alone, represent the
people” (Müller, 2017, p. 3). This has a number of consequences at the domestic
level, including a weakening of intermediary democratic institutions, which are per-
ceived as hampering the direct connection between populist leaders and the “true
people” (Müller, 2017, p. 31). As Urbinati (2019, 113) argues, populists in power
will “disfigure” democracy, “by making the principles of democratic legitimacy
(the people and the majority) the possession of a part of the people, which a strong
leader embodies and mobilizes against other parts (minorities and the political
opposition).”
Being a thin-centered ideology, populism does not entail any specific ideas about
foreign policy, nor any explicitly articulated preferences concerning the liberal inter-
national order. However, we argue that it is possible to derive some expectations
about populist governments’ foreign policy preferences based on the “thin” dimen-
sions of anti-elitism and people-centrism.3 In the following, we will elaborate on
how populists can be expected to relate the two constitutive dimensions of their
thin-centered ideology to the various components of the US-led liberal international
order. As we will see, there are substantive theoretical reasons to expect populists to
be opposed to the core components of such order, but also indications from qualita-
tive studies and anecdotal evidence that such theoretical expectations do not hold in
each and every case. Our quantitative analysis will offer the first systematic assess-
ment of the broader impact that populism has on foreign policy preferences concern-
ing the US-led liberal international order.
Multilateralism constitutes the backbone of the liberal international order. It refers
to the dense web of international institutions that were created after World War II
to facilitate and promote cooperation among states with the aim of solving collec-
tive action problems. The recent literature on populism and international politics has
pointed towards the fact that not all populists are automatically opposed to multi-
lateralism in a wholesale manner, but rather to the specific multilateral institutions
that form the core of the “Western” liberal international order. In some cases, popu-
list governments have actively promoted own regional multilateral organizations to
fight hegemonic international “elites” – think of Hugo Chávez’ creation of the Boli-
varian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and promotion of South
American regionalism as a way to implement his Bolivarian revolution against US
imperialism. India’s populist prime minister Modi has engaged in global governance
3 With its focus on clearly defined notions of anti-elitism and people-centrism and the idea of populist
governments representing the “volonté générale,” populism is distinct from other, broader, thin-centered
ideologies such as statism. According to Voeten (2021: 24), statism can essentially be defined as an
opposition to the Western liberal order: “Statism as a thin ideology does not have detailed prescriptions
for how domestic societies should be organized, but it does have a vision on where the Western liberal
orthodoxy is wrong, not just on one issue but also on many seemingly unrelated issues. Opposition to the
liberal order is motivated by a set of collective ideas that emphasize self-determination as ethically good,
reserve a prominent role for the state in domestic political economy, favor redistributing resources away
from the West, and advocate for the restoration of noninterference into the domestic affairs of states.” In
a nutshell, statism entails a number of preferences concerning international order and has therefore huge
overlaps with our dependent variable.
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
and multilateralism as this engagement can be considered a useful status-seeking
strategy in international politics (Destradi & Plagemann, 2019). Recent research has
argued that populists are not per se opposed to multilateralism, but that they are
rather interested in promoting alternative – illiberal – “scripts” of (regional) multi-
lateral cooperation (Söderbaum etal., 2021). In theoretical terms, opposition to lib-
eral multilateral institutions can be expected to flow from both components of popu-
list thin ideology: anti-elitism and people-centrism. In fact, the US as a hegemonic
power are frequently portrayed as the elite or the establishment in world politics, and
anti-Americanism is deeply ingrained in both left- and right-wing populisms in vari-
ous parts of the world (see for example Ostermann & Stahl, 2022). We would thus
expect populists to reject multilateral institutions that are strongly shaped by the US
or that focus on issues like human rights, but not necessarily multilateralism as such.
Besides anti-elitism, opposition to multilateral institutions espousing liberal
values might also be strongly related to populists’ claim to represent the “people.”
Such claim will be associated with a call for a return to national sovereignty: popu-
lists frequently present themselves as the advocates of the “true people” who will
“take back control” in the name of the people. People-centrism is thereby intimately
related to sovereignism (Basile & Mazzoleni, 2020; Chryssogelos, 2020). Söder-
baum etal. (2021, 3) indeed suggest that populists will prefer new forms of multilat-
eral cooperation framed in terms of anti-liberalism, threatened identities, and pop-
ular sovereignty. By contrast, they will de-legitimize international institutions that
fail to represent the “popular will.” As Spandler and Söderbaum (2023, 1025) put
it, “populist leaders […] challenge and replace the conventional liberal legitimacy
standards with a specific populist inflection by demanding that IOs should provide
governance ‘for the people’ and ‘by the people’, rather than for/by detached elites.”
Moreover, Pacciardi etal. (2024) find that populists have various ways of disengag-
ing from international organizations, but that exiting such organizations altogether
is rarely an option.All this indicates that – beyond anecdotal evidence of populist
governments undermining multilateral institutions – there are theoretical reasons to
expect populists in power to be wary of US-led multilateral institutions but not nec-
essarily of multilateralism as such.
Another core feature of the liberal international order is a focus on individual rights
and freedoms, which also translates into efforts to spread human rights and democ-
racy internationally. Such promotion of liberal values abroad can take various forms,
from engagement for norm diffusion to forcible intervention. In the latter form, active
promotion of liberal values abroad has been one of the most contentious aspects of the
Western liberal world order, and the often illiberal practices of the US have arguably
been one of the main drivers of the backlash against it (see Duncombe & Dunne, 2018).
There are several reasons to expect populist governments to be particularly opposed
to this aspect of the liberal order. First of all, interventionism can be understood as
an inherently “elitist” project: the very idea of imposing a system of government on
another country clearly entails a claim of superiority (Krastev & Holmes, 2019). Popu-
lists at the “receiving end” of democracy promotion efforts will therefore easily attrib-
ute such liberal policies to a selfish international elite keen to subjugate the true peo-
ple. Relatedly, as was mentioned above, populists’ claim to represent the “people” goes
hand in hand with a strong emphasis on national sovereignty and with the mission of
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
protecting the people from external interference. Sovereignism is therefore an important
international corollary of populism. Yet, the US-led international order, especially in its
manifestation after the end of the Cold War, entails an “almost inevitable […] erosion
of Westphalian sovereignty” (Ikenberry, 2009, p. 79). Democracy promotion will there-
fore be especially problematic for populists: while they are not intrinsically opposed
to liberal democracy (Voeten, 2020, p. 413), they certainly can be expected to have a
strong preference against its imposition abroad as this violates national sovereignty and
goes against the fundamental idea that popular will should find direct representation.
At the same time, for populists in power in those countries that have a tradition of pro-
moting democracy abroad, putting the people “first” can be expected to translate into
isolationist policies. According to their logic, the focus of government policies should
be on the “people” narrowly defined. Spending scarce resources to bring democracy
and human rights to others abroad will be difficult to justify if the rhetorical emphasis
of populist governments is always on the primacy of the “people”.
When it comes to human rights, we can similarly expect populists to be extremely
skeptical about their promotion abroad. While populism again does not by definition
entail an aversion to the implementation of core human rights norms, the construc-
tion of the “people” by populist groups and leaders frequently entails the exclusion
of some sections of society (Müller, 2017; Urbinati, 2019). Deeply divisive policies
have in several instances led to human rights violations by populist governments
– from the brutal war on drugs in the Philippines under Duterte (Thompson, 2016)
to the establishment of a majoritarian anti-Muslim discourse and the repression in
Muslim-majority Kashmir under populist Prime Minister Modi in India (Plagemann
and Destradi, 2019). Against this backdrop, we can expect populist governments to
be opposed to the kind of advocacy for human rights that is typical of liberal interna-
tionalism and that has often led to interventions abroad in the name of liberal values.
When it comes to economic openness, another core feature of the US-led liberal
international order, there are less explicit expectations to be derived from populism.
Being a thin-centered ideology, populism does not entail any prescriptions about the
kind of economic policies that populist governments should follow, and indeed the
1990s saw a wave of neoliberal populism in Latin America (Weyland, 2001; Wajner,
2021). Verbeek and Zaslove (2017) argue that populist parties’ preferences on trade
will vary as they will mainly be driven by thick ideology, and empirical studies on
Europe show that even among parties of the same “thick ideological” family there
are substantial differences in approaches to economic integration (Cavallaro et al.,
2018). Yet, in theoretical terms the centrality of the “people” narrowly defined can
be expected to contribute to a high degree of skepticism vis-à-vis economic open-
ness on the part of populists. In the broad debate on the causes of populism, one of
the most common explanations for the success of populism focuses on the perceived
negative consequences of globalization, not just in cultural terms (Kriesi etal., 2008)
but also in economic terms (Rodrik, 2017). Populists’ calls for putting their countries
“first”– from US President Trump’s infamous slogan “America First” to similar calls
by parties such as India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (Madhav, 2020) – entail a rejection of
some of the key principles of economic openness. In many cases, this is accompanied
by the notion that an international or transnational economic elite is trying to exploit
the virtuous people by taking away their jobs or by imposing neoliberal policies on
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
them. Latin American left-wing populists such as Hugo Chávez have built their entire
domestic mobilization strategy on such fears of a US-led transnational capitalist elite
bent on exploiting the “people.” But also right-wing populists like Turkey’s president
Erdoğan have resorted to the notion of the people being endangered by global finan-
cial lobbies and an obscure Western-led ‘mastermind’ (‘üst akıl’) (Taş, 2020).
In sum, populism as a thin-centered ideology is in many ways at odds with the
core principles of the liberal international order. We therefore develop the general
expectation that the more populist a government, the more its foreign policy prefer-
ences will be at odds with the US-led liberal international order.
As was mentioned above, thick ideologies can be expected to play an important role
in shaping populists’ approaches to world politics. Ultimately, they entail more detailed
expectations about what politics should look like, and they determine how populists will
define the ‘people’ and the ‘elite’. When it comes to preferences about the US-led lib-
eral international order, we expect that left-wing populists will be more opposed to it
than right-wing populists. This is so because leftist thick ideologies entail a more explicit
rejection of neoliberal economic policies, and therefore are more averse to one important
ideal-typical component of the liberal international order; moreover, left-wing thick ide-
ologies entail a more pronounced aversion for US hegemony, which plays an important
role given the centrality of the US in the liberal international order.
In order to account for the political context in which populists operate, we also
explore whether the preferences of populist governments concerning the liberal inter-
national order vary in line with the quality of democracy in their respective countries.
While large parts of the literature on populism consider populism to be a genuinely
democratic phenomenon given populists’ claim to represent the ‘popular will’, we also
know that populists in power end up weakening democratic institutions and checks and
balances (Urbinati, 2019; Pappas, 2019). Indeed, several countries governed by populists
over longer periods of time such as Turkey or India have experienced democratic back-
sliding (Esen & Gumuscu, 2016; Tudor, 2023). We expect populist governments in less
democratic countries to be more opposed to the liberal international order as compared
to those in more democratic ones, mainly because of their deeper aversion towards inter-
ference with domestic affairs via the promotion of democracy and human rights, as well
as because of their suspicion of multilateral institutions that promote democratic norms.4
4 Empirical strategy
Our country-year data set includes all UN member states with a population of at least
500,000 people from 1975 to 2015 and allows us to test the extent to which populism
leads to less pronounced preferences for the US-led liberal international order.5 We
set the end point of our analysis in 2015 in order to measure populist preferences
4 On the tensions between democratic backsliders and EU institutions, see Winzen (2023).
5 It should be noted that not all countries enter our data set in 1975 due to missing data in one of the
main data sets on which our variables rely. This is not a problem as we are interested in changes of the
foreign policy preferences within one country.
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
towards the US-led LIO before the US itself openly rejected several of its founda-
tions under President Trump. As populism is not a recent phenomenon, this time span
allows us to also include cases from the Cold War-era. A good indicator of a govern-
ment’s foreign policy preferences is its voting behavior in the annual United Nations
General Assembly (UNGA). The UNGA offers all member states the opportunity to
demonstrate their preferences through their voting behavior. This is particularly rel-
evant for smaller states that have less opportunities to do so on the international stage
as compared to more powerful states (Moon, 1985). States demonstrate their prefer-
ences in the UNGA on a variety of international issues ranging from disarmament
to human rights or development. As Mattes etal. (2015, 283) put it, “a country’s
voting record in the UNGA is a latent indicator of its foreign policy orientation and
international alignments; it is a record of how the state wants to be seen by others, the
international norms it finds acceptable, and the positions it is willing to take publicly
on a wide variety of issues.” Since several issues are debated repeatedly in the annual
sessions, UNGA voting behavior allows us to examine possible changes in states’ for-
eign policy preferences over time (Bailey etal., 2017, p. 431). Even though domestic
audiences are frequently not aware of the actual voting behavior of their governments
in the UNGA, meaning that these votes will not directly be used by populist gov-
ernments for mobilization purposes, we work with the assumption that UNGA votes
reflect foreign policy preferences and therefore mirror how populist governments
relate to the world and what drives their foreign policy.
We make use of the UNGA voting-pattern measure developed by Bailey etal.
(2017), which estimates the ideal point of states over time by using a spatial voting
model adapted to the UNGA setting. The measurement is based on votes that take
place in multiple UNGA sessions, allowing to identify changes in preferences for
each country over time. The UNGA voting-pattern provides us with an estimate of
the ideal point for each country in each UNGA session, and such ideal point refers
to the approval of the US-led LIO (Bailey etal., 2017).6 The measurement of agree-
ment with the liberal international order has been developed through a statistical
procedure, which captures changes in such order over time (see Bailey etal., 2017).
It is important to note that this measure differs from mere vote convergence with the
United States: it reflects the US-led character of the LIO, that is, the disproportion-
ate influence of the US on such order, but also the fact that the US did not shape that
order completely and exclusively.
6 It is important to note that the data from Bailey etal. (2017) do not allow statements to be made about
individual thematic decisions in the UNGA. Furthermore, Häge and Hug (2016) point out that a high
number of resolutions are adopted as consensus decisions without a vote, whereby this varies over time
and topic. In these cases, there is a consensus between the delegates, which therefore means approval.
Therefore, like other measures for UNGA votes, the Bailey etal. (2017) data tend to underestimate con-
sensus. Since this bias exists for the entire period of our study, albeit with a certain dynamic fluctuation
(Häge & Hug, 2016: 504), the data from Bailey etal. (2017) give us a relatively reliable insight into the
preferences of the individual states concerning the US-led LIO on those issues where dissent exists at all.
However, the data might underestimate the consensus as agreement in form of unrecorded or consensus
votes is not included (Häge & Hug, 2016: 528).
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
According to Voeten (2021, 39), such measure allows us to identify, in every year,
the position of each state vis-à-vis the predominant dimension of contestation that has
shaped world politics since 1946. Such contestation has taken place in a low-dimen-
sional ideological space that sees an opposition between two broad notions about how
to address a wide range of issues in world politics: “On the one side, there are states
who are more comfortable with U.S. leadership, whose preferred image of society is
one in which democratic elections allocate political powers, where markets allocate
resources, and where courts protect individual rights. On the other side, governments
advocate for a greater role of the state in domestic and international economies, empha-
size self-determination as ethically good, and favor redistributing resources and author-
ity away from the West and the restoration of non-interference into the domestic affairs
of states” (Voeten, 2021, p. 39). In other words, the measure provided by Bailey etal.
(2017) captures attitudes towards liberal internationalism (Voeten, 2021, p. 39), meas-
uring shifts in each country’s policy preferences towards the US-led LIO over time. It
captures overall preferences with regard to those key elements of the liberal interna-
tional order that were mentioned above.7 The higher the values of a country’s UNGA
voting-pattern estimate, the higher its approval of the liberal international order. The
UNGA voting-pattern ranges from − 2.40, indicating a strong disagreement with the
liberal international order, as in the case of Hungary in 1977, to 3.15, indicating very
strong agreement, as in the case of the United States in 1989.8
4.1 Measuring populism
We are interested in the effect of the degree of populism of a state’s government on
its voting behavior in the UNGA with regard to the liberal international order. For
our independent variable, we use the Varieties of Party Identity and Organization
(V-Party) data set (Lührmannet al., 2020). The V-Party data set allows us to test the
effect of populism on foreign policy preferences as it contains measures that are linked
to our definition of populism as thin-centered ideology entailing anti-elitism and peo-
ple-centrism (Mudde, 2004). Unlike other data collection efforts in this area, such as
the Global Populism Database (Hawkinset al., 2019) or the Global Party Survey (Nor-
ris, 2020), the V-Party data set allows us to track populism over a much longer time
period. As opposed to fine-grained data limited to specific regions (Meijers & Zaslove,
2021), the V-Party data set has the advantage of having a global reach.
The V-Party data set is based on a survey in which experts assess each party’s
position on the basis of documents such as election manifestos, press releases, offi-
cial speeches and media interviews (see Lührmannet al., 2020 for more information).9
7 A measurement of preferences vis-à-vis single elements of the liberal international order is not avail-
able in the dataset by Bailey etal. (2017).
8 This reveals that the measurement of preferences vis-à-vis the liberal international order is not identi-
cal with preferences of the United States.
9 For a critical discussion of the use of expert surveys in measuring populism, see Meijers and Zaslove
2021. For more information on how some of the problems were addressed in the V-Dem dataset, see
Lührmannet al. (2020).
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
As we focus on populist governments, we have based our measure of populism on
the party to which the head of government belongs.10 This decision is based on the
assumption that, in coalition governments, the head of government will usually belong
to the strongest party, which will also have the greatest influence on foreign policy.
Even if junior coalition partners might play an important (or even disproportionate)
role in foreign policy, for example by controlling the foreign ministry, we expect that a
governing coalition will broadly agree on the most fundamental foreign policy prefer-
ences – those regarding the core principles governing the international order.
We use the degree of populism as independent variable in the main models. This
variable is based on an index of the two definitional aspects of populism—anti-elit-
ism and people-centrism. It thus provides us with a measure of how populist the gov-
ernment was in that year. The variable ranges from 0, not populist at all, to 1, very
populist. The National Renewal Alliance in Brazil (1978–1981) is the least populist
party (0.026), while the Fifth Republic Movement in Venezuela (1998–2009), the
party of Hugo Chávez, is the most populist party in our sample (0.993).
In line with the understanding of populism as a thin-centered ideology, populism
entails a measurement of anti-elitism. This measure is based on a party’s rhetoric
against elites, understood as small groups that have more power than others in a
society. In line with the predominating literature, Lührmannet al. (2020) clarify that
the understanding of who belongs to the elite can differ between parties and coun-
tries, and that it can refer to actors at the domestic or international level. Therefore,
the concept of elite is context-specific in each country. The measurement is an indi-
cator based on a 4-item response from “not at all important” (0) to “very important”
(4). The White Path in the Kyrgyz Republic in 2007 to 2009 is the least anti-elitist
party in our sample (0.058). Again, Hugo Chávez’ Fifth Republic Movement in
Venezuela is the party with the strongest anti-elitism component of populism with a
score of 3.987 from 1998 to 2009.
The other constitutive dimension of populism measured by the data set is people-
centrism. This concept involves a glorification of the common people and assumes
the existence of a homogenous group that constitutes the “people” and which the
party represents. In line with the notion of the “general will” proposed by Mudde
(2004), such understanding of the people denies that divergent interests and values
exist in society, as only the “will of the people” counts (Lührmann et al., 2020).
Again, the measurement is an indicator based on a 4-item response ranging from
“never – the party leadership never glorifies and identifies with the ordinary peo-
ple” (0) to “always – the party leadership always glorifies and identifies with the
ordinary people, which they claim to represent” (4). In our sample, the party For a
United Ukraine! in Ukraine has the lowest degree of people-centrism with a score of
0.272 (2002–2005). At the other extreme is the United Socialist Party of Venezuela
10 In 16 countries at different points in time, two or more parties are named as the party of the head
of government in the V-Party data set. In these cases, we included the party with the highest populism
index, based on the assumption that populism will influence the entire government, as the literature has
amply shown that populist discourse tends to spread, even from parties in the opposition (Jakupec, 2017,
2). However, we also ran the models using the party with the lowest populism index, and our results
remained similar.
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
(2010–2015), a party created by Chávez to bring together different political forces
supporting his Bolivarian revolution, which displays a score of 3.98 and thereby has
a strong orientation towards people-centered populism.
We are also interested in whether the “thick” ideology of a party, independent
from its populist stance, will affect the populist government’s voting. We use the
economic left-right scale for each party from the V-Party data set (Lührmann et
al., 2020). This variable focuses on the economic stance of the party. It is based on
whether a party wants the government to play an active role in the economy (left-
wing) or it emphasizes a reduced economic role for the government (right-wing).
On this basis, we construct a categorial variable entailing left-wing ideologies (far
left and center-left), right-wing ideologies (center-right and far-right) and centrist
ideologies, which we take as reference category in our statistical analysis. The distri-
bution between left-wing and right-wing ideologies is relatively equal, with parties
having a left-wing ideology in 25% of all observations and a right-wing ideology in
21%. Parties with a centrist ideology account for 54% of all observations.
In our third hypothesis we are interested in whether the quality of democracy
affects the UNGA voting behavior of populist governments. We therefore include
the Electoral Democracy Index from V-Dem (Coppedgeet al., 2020) to measure the
country’s level of democracy. The electoral democracy index is a basic measure of
democratic freedoms, measuring whether the electoral process comes close to the
democratic ideal of fair and equal elections. Our Populism measure and the electoral
democracy index do not correlate. Thus, populist governments can be found in more
or less democratic states.
4.2 Controls
To test for a systematic relation between UNGA voting-pattern and populism, we
include a number of variables to control for potential alternative explanatory fac-
tors at the party level, the state level, and the international level. At the party level,
we consider the number of years the party has been in office in consecutive years
(term). Parties that are new in office may initially stick to their populist ideology and
agenda in foreign policy to show their voters that they are willing to break with past
policies, but they might adjust their positions and voting behavior in the UNGA in
the longer term, returning to conventional foreign policy preferences. This would
be in line with realist theorizing in IR, which assumes that there is an immutable
“national interest” and that “politics stops at the water’s edge” (Gowa, 1998). An
example is US President Trump initially calling for the US to leave NATO, but
ultimately remaining part of it. But the opposite might likewise happen. Several
populists stay in power for many years, getting re-elected. As they consolidate their
power as the governing “elite,” they can be expected to increasingly resort to for-
eign policy issues to maintain domestic support, generating a “rally around the flag”
effect (see Tir, 2010).
Next, we control for the country’s economic strength by including the GDP per
capita as measured by the World Bank. We use the natural logarithm of the data in
the main models, but the effects of the explanatory variables remain similar once we
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
use the absolute number. Since a country’s interconnectedness with others can be
expected to affect its voting behavior and can also influence whether populists come
to power, we control for the country’s involvement in globalization. The variable
is the KOF’s (Konjunkturforschungsstelle ETH Zürich) de facto trade globalization
index, which is based on the trade in goods and services, and a measurement for
trade partner diversity (Gygli etal., 2019).
At the international level, studies have shown that aid dependency may also influ-
ence voting behavior in the UN (Dreher etal., 2008). We limit our controls to the
amount of US aid received by the country since the UNGA voting-pattern measures
the country’s preference with regard to the US-led LIO (Bailey etal., 2017). We use
information from the US Greenbook, which contains annual financial obligations
in the economic and military spheres for all countries in the world (constant US-
Dollar). Since the data is skewed, we use the natural logarithm of the data to control
for the influence of the US on the UNGA voting of states.
5 Empirical results
Our data set is at the country-year level and includes 156 countries from 1975 to
2015. A first look at the data already shows a possible relationship between the level
of populism and the country’s UNGA voting-pattern. FiguresA1-3 in the appendix11
show the overall relationship between our dependent variable, the UNGA voting pat-
tern, and our main independent variable, populism, as well as for anti-elitism and
people-centrism. The scatter plots are in line with our expectation: the higher the
level of populism, the lower the country’s preference for the US-led LIO.
In a next step, we analyze whether this relationship is systematic. Due to the
continuous nature of our dependent variable, we use OLS regression. Since we are
interested in how populism affects the country’s UNGA voting-pattern, as a proxy
for preferences related to the liberal international order, we include state-level fixed
effects in all models to account for unmeasured, time-invariant factors. We use
lagged independent variables to mitigate the potential for reverse causality. Year
fixed effects are also included to account for possible changes over time. We run the
models without state-level and year fixed effects with comparable results (see Model
2 and 4 for the main models).
Table 1 shows the main results with UNGA voting-pattern as the dependent
variable and the lagged values of the different populism indicators as explanatory
variables. Model 1 only estimates the relationship between the independent and
dependent variable with fixed effects and model 2 without any fixed-effects. The
other models include the control variables with and without fixed-effects (Models 3
and 4), as well as the two interaction effects to test our second and third hypotheses
(Models 5 and 6). Models 1 to 4 include the populism index and the findings are
consistent with our expectation and descriptive evidence: Populist governments are
more likely to reject the US-led LIO. The effect is substantial (Fig.1): If the level of
11 The Appendix is available at the Review of International Organizations’ webpage.
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
Table 1 Populist voting (1975–2015)
(M1) (M2) (M3) (M4) (M5) (M6)
UNGA
voting-pattern
UNGA
voting-pattern
UNGA
voting-pattern
UNGA
voting-pattern
UNGA
voting-pattern
UNGA
voting-pattern
Populism -0.212*** -0.254*** -0.190*** -0.290*** -0.074+ -0.548***
(0.038) (0.038) (0.031) (0.033) (0.041) (0.065)
Left-wing -0.054*** -0.026 0.091** -0.060***
(0.016) (0.017) (0.029) (0.016)
Right-wing 0.043** 0.031* 0.068** 0.046***
(0.013) (0.014) (0.024) (0.013)
Electoral democracy 0.498*** 0.221*** 0.471*** 0.250***
(0.046) (0.004) (0.046) (0.061)
Term -0.005*** -0.012*** -0.005*** -0.005***
(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001)
US military aid (log) 0.006*** 0.004*** 0.006*** 0.005***
(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001)
US economic aid (log) 0.008*** 0.000 0.008*** 0.008***
(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001)
GDP pc (log) 0.044** -0.080*** 0.043** 0.047***
(0.013) (0.009) (0.013) (0.013)
Globalization 0.000 -0.003*** -0.000 -0.000
(0.001) (0.001) (0.001) (0.001)
Left-wing # Populism -0.343***
(0.058)
Right-wing # Populism -0.067
(0.069)
Populism # Electoral Democracy 0.659***
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
Table 1 (continued)
(M1) (M2) (M3) (M4) (M5) (M6)
(0.106)
Country fixed effects YES NO YES NO YES YES
Year fixed effects YES NO YES NO YES YES
Constant 0.015 0.060 -0.412** 0.811*** -0.420*** -0.285*
(0.082) (0.063) (0.126) (0.073) (0.126) (0.127)
N 4830 4830 4505 4505 4505 4505
+p<0.10, * p<0.05, ** p<0.01, *** p<0.001
Standard errors in parantheses
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
populism increases from 0.071 to 0.80 (corresponds to the 5th and 95th percentiles
of all observations), the value for the dependent variable decreases from 0.089 to
-0.0049 (Model 3).
Given the debate on whether populism has a distinct impact on foreign policy, or
on whether the latter is rather driven by thick ideologies, in order to test our second
hypothesis, we test whether there is an interaction effect between populism and left-
wing or right-wing party ideology (Model 5 in Table1). As the predictive margins
for the interaction effects show, populist parties with a left-wing ideology tend to
reject the liberal international order much more strongly than populist parties with
a centrist or right-wing ideology (Fig.2). This is in line with the notion of the LIO
order being US-led and thereby clearly associated with US hegemony as well as cap-
italism. Governments led by parties with a left-wing ideology will naturally be more
openly skeptical of such order. Importantly, however, our analysis demonstrates that
the thin-centered ideology of populism has an impact on preferences vis-à-vis the
liberal international order regardless of the thick ideology it is combined with.
To test our third hypothesis, we look at the effect of the quality of democracy and
populism on its support of the US-led LIO. As outlined before, we would expect that
populist governments in more democratic states will be less opposed to the US-led
LIO than those in less democratic states as the former are more open towards issues
like democracy and human rights promotion as well as multilateralism. Model 6
in Table1 tests whether there is an interaction effect between the electoral democ-
racy index and populism. As the predictive margins for the interaction effects show,
populists in less democratic countries tend to reject the US-led LIO much more
Fig. 1 Predictive margins for Model 3 (Table1) with 95% confidence interval
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
strongly than populists in democracies (Fig.3). This is consistent with the argument
that democratic states are generally more supportive of the US-led LIO than more
autocratic ones, which were often heavily criticized for their poor performance on
democracy and human rights.
We found consistent effects of the control variables in all models (Table1). Parties
that have been in power longer tend to reject the liberal international order more explic-
itly, most probably in a mobilization effort aimed at creating a “rally-around-the-flag”
effect to keep domestic support alive even after having become the governing “elite.” In
line with previous research, rich countries are also more in favor of the liberal interna-
tional order. Not surprisingly, the level of military aid and economic aid from the US
both are positively correlated with the acceptance of the US-led liberal order.
5.1 Populist governments andtheUnited Nations
In line with our theoretical argument, we have shown that populist governments are
more likely to reject the US-led LIO in UNGA votes. At the same time, building upon
the findings of recent qualitative studies on populists’ approaches to and (de)legiti-
mation of multilateral institutions (Söderbaum etal., 2021; Spandler & Söderbaum,
2023), we argued above that there are no reasons to expect populists to be opposed
to multilateralism as such, but just to multilateral institutions that are shaped by the
hegemonic power US or that promote liberal values perceived as undermining popular
Fig. 2 Predictive margins for the interaction effects for ideology and populism on UNGA voting-pattern
(M5) with 95% confidence intervals
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
sovereignty. We would thus expect populists not to be opposed to the UN with its uni-
versal membership, and especially not to the UNGA, which is not just the only univer-
sal body in the UN, but also embodies an egalitarian ideal via its one country-one vote
principle. To this end, we ask how populists behave in the UNGA and more specifi-
cally whether they are more likely to evade voting and thus multilateral cooperation.
For this purpose, we use the UNGA Resolutions Voting Data and Issue Categories
(UNGA-RES) dataset (Voelsen, 2021). The study period here is from 1995 to 2015
and refers to the votes of individual countries on individual resolutions in the UNGA.
The dataset contains information on each vote and whether the respective country took
part in the vote. We use this information to create a binary variable that is coded “1” if
the country did not participate in the vote. The logit model includes all previous con-
trol variables and clustered errors at the country level (TableA2).
There is a negative effect indicating that populist governments are less likely than
other governments not to participate in UNGA votes (Fig.4). Populists have there-
fore not turned their backs on the UNGA and chosen an exit option, even in the con-
text of the US-led LIO, but have participated in the votes.
This more nuanced finding on populism and multilateralism indicates that while
populists oppose the tenets of liberalism and US control, they continue to actively
participate in the UN. Qualitative evidence from non-populist and populist govern-
ments with varying thick ideologies in Bolivia, India, Italy, the Philippines, and Tur-
key indicates that populists are not more likely than non-populists to fundamentally
Fig. 3 Predictive margins for the Interaction effects for Electoral democracy and populism on UNGA
voting-pattern (M6) with 95% confidence intervals.Note: To simplify the presentation, the interaction
effects for the electoral democracy index are presented in .3 increments. The corresponding value of the
electoral democracy index is shown in brackets
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
question the existence or the importance of the United Nations. Despite his scath-
ing attacks against UN officials who had criticized his “war on drugs,” inducing
him to even threaten to leave the UN (BBC News, 2016), the Philippines’ Presi-
dent Duterte did not follow up on that threat and in 2021 he argued: “only multi-
lateralism can deliver the global public goods we need” (UNGA, 2021). Yet, like
several other populist governments he was very critical of power hierarchies within
the UN, and especially of UNSC permanent membership reflecting an outdated and
elitist hegemony of great powers. As Turkish President Erdoğan put it: “The current
order, which protects the powerful, disregards the rights of the weak, and confines
the humanity’s fate to the mercy of five countries, is not sustainable. The United
Nations Security Council urgently needs to be reformed with a comprehensive and
inclusive approach.” (Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye, 2023). In making a
similar connection to the plights of the “people” and condemning liberal interven-
tionist practices, Bolivia’s left-wing populist President Evo Morales stated: “I won-
der what the United Nations is for. What do we have treaties and conventions for?
What use is multilateralism? Human multilateralism we welcome; inhuman inter-
ventionism will be combated by people all over the world. I believe that as a union
leader and as someone from one of the most humiliated sectors in the history of
Latin America, the indigenous peasant peoples.” (UNGA, 2013). Populist leaders
thus seem to translate their anti-elitist rhetoric to the international level, criticizing
the inequality in bodies like the UNSC, while participating even more actively than
less populist governments in UNGA voting.
Fig. 4 Predictive margins for the likelihood that a populist government is absent from a voting of a reso-
lution in the UNGA (TableA2) with 95% confidence intervals
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
5.2 Controls
Since the measurement of populism is an index that brings together the two dimen-
sions of anti-elitism and people-centrism, we are also interested in identifying
whether one of these constitutive dimensions has a stronger effect. In theoretical
terms, we can expect anti-elitism to lead to foreign policy preferences that are explic-
itly opposed to the core principles of the US-led LIO. Some scholars highlight that
populists whose thin-centered ideology is strongly anti-elitist will end up construct-
ing conspiracy theories about nefarious foreign elites keen on harming the “true
people” (Destradi etal., 2020). The rejection of the LIO is also frequently linked to
a deep skepticism towards globalization, with its stretching of interconnectedness
across borders, its intensification and acceleration of global flows and processes, and
its deepening enmeshment of the local and the global (Held & McGrew, 1998; Zürn,
2004). All this is seen as an elitist project designed to harm the hard-working, inher-
ently good people, who end up being the losers of globalization (Marks, 2004).
By contrast, populists whose thin ideology has a stronger “people-centric” streak
can be expected to focus on emphasizing the virtues of the people, and this might
induce them to adopt a foreign policy discourse centered on highlighting the great-
ness of the nation (Destradi etal., 2020). They will still be suspicious of the LIO, but
they will not necessarily consider it an existential threat to a strong – and arguably
much more resilient – people. Indeed, if the “true people” is magnified in its virtues
and strengths, populists will call for it to withstand the negative implications of the
liberal international order, but they might not need to reject such order tout court.
We test the effect of the two components of populism on UNGA voting-pat-
tern separately in Models 4 and 5 (TableA1). As we hypothesized, both forms of
populism have a statistically significant negative effect. If the level of anti-elitism
increases from 0.157 to 3.134 (corresponds to the 5th and 95th percentiles of all
observations), the value for the dependent variable decreases from 0.079 to -0.043.
People-centrism has a comparably strong effect: If the value of people-centrism
increases from 0.701 to 3.859 (corresponds to the 5th and 95th percentiles of all
observations), the value for the dependent variable decreases from 0.119 to -0.039.
In sum, both dimensions of populisms have a negative effect on the acceptance of
the US-led LIO.
Furthermore, we run a series of robustness checks based on our main models to
increase confidence in our results (see Appendix for full models). The populism data
is based on an expert survey, which can lead to problems due to under- or overre-
porting of populism for different countries and decades. While V-Dem has already
applied a very sophisticated system to identify possible skews (see Lührmannet al.,
2020), some problems risk to remain. To control for this, we carried out a robust-
ness check with the lowest expert estimates for the populism variables. This should
make it more difficult to find a statistically significant correlation, since populism
should be underestimated in these measures. If we take these low estimates for the
populism variables, rather than the best measure as in the main models, our results
remain stable – populism decreases the probability that the state votes in line with
the norms of the liberal international order (TableA1).
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
We run the models without the economic controls as they reduce the numbers
of observations due to missing values. With the exemption of a now not significant
result for anti-elitism, all other results are similar (TableA3). Because the LIO is
conceptualized as US-led in the data set we use, we excluded both the US and the
UK, the main proponents of such order, individually and jointly from our sampling
in some of the checks. The results remain stable (TableA4). Finally, we included a
dummy to indicate the post-Cold War period, since the time periods differ not only
in terms of the structural features of the international system, but also in terms of
the features of the international order (Ikenberry, 2009). The effect is negative and
significant, meaning that the rejection of the liberal international order was stronger
in the decades after the Cold War as one would expect (Börzel & Zürn, 2021). Nev-
ertheless, all populism indicators are still statistically significantly correlated with a
decrease in UNGA voting-pattern (TableA5). The same holds true when we include,
instead of a cold war dummy, a dummy for the post-1999 period in order to differen-
tiate between the so-called ‘neo-liberal neo-populist wave’ (Wajner, 2021: 653) from
the start of our available data in 1975 until 1999; and for the so-called ‘progressive
neo-populist wave’ (ibid.) from 2000 until the end of our data in 2015 (TableA6).
If our results are robust, we should expect to observe an effect when a change in
government occurs in a country, either towards or away from a populist regime. In
order to capture this as close in time as possible, we created a variable that measures
the changes in populism compared to the year before and a comparable variable for
Fig. 5 Predictive margins for the likelihood of the effect of changes in populism on changes in the UNGA
voting-pattern (M2, TableA7) with 95% confidence intervals.Note: A minus change in populism indi-
cates a shift to a less populist government compared to the prior year
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
the changes in the UNGA voting patterns variable. As Fig.4 in the Appendix shows,
in most cases there are only marginal changes in both variables on an annual basis
(see A-8 for an overview of cases). This is to be expected, as in most cases the same
government is involved. The large swings are usually associated with a change of
government and also have a corresponding influence on the country’s voting behav-
ior in the UNGA. We run the same models as before but now including a difference
measure as dependent and independent variable. In line with our theoretical expec-
tations, the greater the jump in the intensity of populism of a government compared
to the previous year, the more marked the change in UNGA voting patterns (Fig.5).
6 Conclusion
The literature on the crisis of the liberal international order has long claimed that
populism has detrimental consequences for the core principles of such order, but it
has so far not empirically substantiated this claim. In turn, the literature on populism
has long ignored the important international consequences that populism might
have. With this contribution, we have brought together these two bodies of literature,
providing an empirical confirmation of the impact of populism on foreign policy
preferences with regards to the core principles of the US-led LIO.
Our findings are straightforward: populism is associated with foreign policy pref-
erences opposed to the core principles of the US-led LIO. The skepticism of “lib-
eral” multilateralism, economic openness, and the promotion of liberal democracy
and human rights has shaped populists’ approach to international politics over the
past four decades.
In our empirical analysis we also accounted for differences among populist
governments and we found that, indeed, not all populists are the same, but that
populism “as such” matters when it comes to preferences on the international
order. We found that there is no substantial difference among populists who tend
to emphasize more anti-elitism vs. those who place greater emphasis on people-
centrism. By contrast, the thick ideologies that are combined with populism have
a stronger impact: left-wing populist governments will be more prone than cen-
trist or right-wing populist governments to develop preferences opposed to the
US-led LIO. Importantly, however, populism, despite being a thin-centered ideol-
ogy, has an impact on preferences vis-à-vis the LIO regardless of the thick ideol-
ogy it is combined with. We also found that populists in less democratic states
tend to be more opposed to the LIO than those in more democratic ones. So apart
from populism as a thin-centered ideology, both thick ideology and the politi-
cal system influence the preferences of populist governments towards the US-led
LIO. Regarding populists’ attitudes towards multilateral institutions, we did not
find that populism makes governments less likely to participate in UNGA votes.
Populists are not opposed to multilateralism as such, but rather to multilateral
institutions that emphasize liberal principles such as democracy promotion or
human rights and that entail power hierarchies.
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S.Destradi, J.Vüllers
Our findings are important for several reasons. First, they lend support to the long-
held assumption that populism indeed undermines the core principles of the LIO. As
populism spreads all over the world, this should be expected to have major consequences
for multilateralism, free trade, democracy, and human rights. Importantly, we need to
acknowledge that populism has spread to many still understudied countries, including
in the Global South. While our empirical analysis stopped in 2015, the fact that we have
populists in power in important emerging powers, from India to Turkey, but also in a
range of smaller states in all world regions (as well as increasingly successful populist
parties across Europe, as the 2024 European Parliament election has shown) underscores
that the LIO is braced to face more substantial challenges in the future. More research is
needed that addresses the specificities of populism in various world regions and delves
deeper into how exactly populist preferences translate into populist foreign policy.
Second, our findings provide a systematic confirmation that populism does
indeed have implications for international politics. While this has mostly been dis-
cussed via case studies and qualitative comparisons so far, we were able to iden-
tify the impact of populism as a broader trend in international politics. Populism is
a thin-centered ideology primarily focused on domestic issues, but once populists
come to power, such ideology will have important consequences for their countries’
conduct in international affairs. For international institutions and for governments
interacting with populists, this implies a need to devise new strategies on how to
engage with them. Our more fine-grained findings on various types of populist gov-
ernments reveal that cooperation will be most difficult with left-wing populist gov-
ernments and with those in hybrid democracies or autocracies. At the same time, an
international order that is less focused on the US and more pluralistic might produce
less skepticism and rejection on the part of populist governments.
Third, and relatedly, our findings open up a range of new avenues for further
research. If populism does indeed have international consequences, we should try
to uncover them in greater detail. Besides the issue of overall disagreement with
the broad features of the international order, future research should delve into the
impact of populism on the provision of global public goods, on engagement in
crisis management, on trade policies, and so forth. Moreover, we need a better
understanding of how and why populists engage to varying degrees in different
multilateral institutions and, more generally, of the complex interplay of thin and
thick ideologies in shaping these components of populist foreign policy.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https:// doi.
org/ 10. 1007/ s11558- 024- 09569-w.
Acknowledgements We are grateful to Sebastian Hellmeier, Roman Krtsch, Georg Strüver as well as to
the team at the Chair for International Relations at the University of Freiburg for their very helpful com-
ments and feedback. An earlier version of this paper was presented on 29 March 2022 at the International
Studies Association Annual Convention. We thank Johannes Plagemann for his excellent feedback.San-
dra Destradi thanks the German Research Foundation for financial support in the context of the project
"Populism and Foreign Policy" (grant DE 1918/3-1).
Author contributions Author contributions to research design and conceptualization: S.D. (60%), J.V.
(40%); statistical analysis: J.V. (100%); writing: S.D. (70%), J.V. (30%). The order of authors is chosen
alphabetically.
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Populism andtheliberal international order: Ananalysis…
Funding Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.
Data availability Data used in this article come from the following datasets: Voeten E, Strezhnev A, Bai-
ley M (2009), United Nations General Assembly Voting Data, https:// doi. org/ 10. 7910/ DVN/ LEJUQZ,
Harvard Dataverse, V18, UNF:6:xkt0YWtoBCThQeTJWAuLfg== [fileUNF]; Lührmann A etal. 2020.
V-Party Dataset v1: Varieties of Democracy, https://v- dem. net/ data/v- party- datas et/; Voelsen D, Bochtler
P and Majewski R (2021). United Nations General Assembly Resolutions: Voting Data and Issue Cat-
egories. SWP - Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik. Version 1.0.0, https:// doi. org/ 10. 7802/ 2297. The final
dataset and the do-files are available at Harvard Dataverse.
Declarations
Conflict of interest There is no conflict of interest/there are no competing interests to report.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended
use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permis-
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licenses/by/4.0/.
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