Explicit anti-populism
Political parties are often pandering or populist: they pursue policies that are widely known to be ineffective because they think they’ll be popular. Examples can include rent controls, petrol subsidies, various NIMBY initiatives, and much else.
Some people vocally complain about this behaviour, and call for less populist parties. Could such parties succeed? At first glance, one might think not. According to this line of thinking, the reason that parties are populist is that it pays off.
I think that’s not wholly wrong. At the same time, I think it can depend on framing. Consider the (mildly annoying) unpopular take tweets: people recognising that their view is unpopular in some quarters in order to undercut criticism. The psychology behind this often seems to be something like the following.
In many of these cases, a large fraction of people have an instinctive aversion to the take. However, at least some people who think a bit about it—either spontaneously, or because they’re prompted to do so by the tweet—reject that aversion and endorse the take. By tweeting “unpopular take” you’re both prompting people to scrutinise that instinctive aversion, and calling it out as an unreflective gut reaction. I think that this actually works to some extent (though I’d be interested in it being tested experimentally).
Perhaps political parties could use a similar strategy. You could envision a political party that didn’t just pursue policies that are less populist—e.g. carbon taxes or land value tax—but that also was very explicit and self-conscious about that. They would effectively market themselves as an anti-populist, wonkish, party that consistently pursued the best policies whether popular or not. (Of course, that wouldn’t be the only aspect of their program—they would also have ideological views.) I could see some voters rewarding that out of principle, though I acknowledge that many would not.
It’s hard to say how much support such a party could win. It would probably be highly contingent on framing, leader, etc. It might have greater chances in a country with proportional representation, especially where the threshold to parliament is low—such as in Denmark (2%) or the Netherlands (~0.67%).
Potentially, the strategy of overcoming populism and instinctive aversions through making it explicit that one is rejecting them could be pursued in other domains as well, besides party politics. I find it a quite interesting and appealing strategy—to go on the counter-offensive against populism, and calling it out as such. It could be worth thinking more about.