How to check if all the elements in list are present in pandas column

You can build a set from the list of names for a faster lookup, and use set.issubset to check if all elements in the set are contained in the column lists:

names = set(['a','c'])
df[df['char'].map(names.issubset)]

   id       char
1   2  [a, b, c]
2   3     [a, c]
5   6  [c, a, d]

Use pd.DataFrame.apply:

df[df['char'].apply(lambda x: set(names).issubset(x))]

Output:

   id       char
1   2  [a, b, c]
2   3     [a, c]
5   6  [c, a, d]