Pluralist Populists Within Context: The Dynamics of Support for Left and Right-Wing Populism in Europe

Populist parties are a stable entity within European party systems. However, what is interesting is that the electoral support for populist parties is unevenly distributed between the North, the South, and Eastern Europe. In the North we tend to find populist radical right parties, in the South populist left parties, and in Eastern Europe it is more variegated. The question is: Are there different dynamics between the regions that explains these trends and what are the differences that account for the varying electoral fortunes of those parties? To address this question, we examine why voters support populist parties, but within different contexts. To do so, we use two successive waves of the European Election Study survey in 2009 and 2014, with macro socio-economic data and expert data on party positions from CHES surveys 2010 and 2014. We perform a multi-level analysis which combines two nested levels, namely voters and country. Looking first at voters, we anticipate similarities and a number of differences. We expect lack of political trust, similar economic attitudes, and opposition to globalization and the EU to unite left and right populist voters. However, we also expect that the radical right voters are anti-immigrant and authoritarian, while the populist radical left voters should favour equality and state intervention. However, we also expect country level variation. We expect higher levels of immigration to increase the propensity to vote for the populist radical right, while higher levels of unemployment will increase the propensity to vote for the populist left. However, we expect that Euroscepticism operates differently in northern and southern European countries, reflecting variation in levels of public support for EU integration, and the current fiscal redistribution between contributor/ recipient EU member states. We consider these implications for understanding populist electoral dynamics in Europe.