Institutional Distance and Symbolic Belonging: Differentiating Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism Across European Societies

Introduction: Research on populist attitudes increasingly treats anti-elitism and people-centrism as distinct components, but the substantive social implications of that distinction remain less clear. This article asks whether the two validated ESS10 dimensions are embedded in different institutional and symbolic relations: distance from political institutions for anti-elitism and markers of national belonging for people-centrism. Methods: Using European Social Survey Round 10 data from 31 European societies, the study reconstructs the Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism dimensions validated by Dolci and Melli (2026), documents their item content and measurement properties, and estimates parallel country-fixed-effects models for standardised factor scores. Formal coefficient-difference tests and targeted robustness checks assess whether their social profiles differ. Results: Anti-elitism and people-centrism are related but only modestly. Institutional distrust and low political interest are much more strongly associated with anti-elitism. National attachment is more strongly associated with people-centrism, and majority-group belonging shows the same directional contrast with lower precision. Immigration closure and threat have small positive zero-order correlations with people-centrism but no independent positive associations in the adjusted specifications. The central contrasts are robust to alternative scoring, weighting, survey-mode checks, country exclusions, and a larger-sample specification that omits household income. Discussions/Conclusions: The findings reveal differentiated institutional and symbolic profiles, showing how Anti-Elitism and People-Centrism are embedded in distinct configurations of political distance and social belonging. This differentiation gives substantive meaning to the distinction between the two validated dimensions, while the ESS10 indicators capture only specific aspects of these broader constructs. People-Centrism is associated more clearly with national belonging than with immigration exclusion once broader social and political correlates are taken into account.