Disentangling Populism, the Far Right, and the Mainstream in European Party Competition

Abstract

Much has been written about populism and its implications for party competition and democratic politics. Yet scholarship often conflates populism with far-right ideology or treats the mainstream as a residual category, which obscures analytically distinct logics of contestation. This article argues that such conceptual slippage weakens theory and measurement in research on European party systems. It advances a framework grounded in classical concept formation that defines populism, the far right, and the mainstream through narrow, mutually exclusive boundaries. Empirically, the article implements this framework using the POPPA expert survey, reconstructing separate indices for each category and assessing their empirical structure. The results show that populism and the far right constitute related but distinct challenger profiles, whereas the mainstream is best captured as a formative institutional pattern. Clarifying these boundaries improves inference about contemporary European party competition.