Ideational and Party-System-Centered Explanations of Populist Success: Latin America and Western Europe Compared

The idea that failures of democratic representation create populist potentials is central both to cleavage-based accounts of party system change, as well as to the ideational approach to populism. In the former framework, populists are seen as agents who re-establish congruence between party systems and specific segments of the electorate. The diagnosis of the ideational approach is one of a more generalized crisis of democratic representation. In both cases, however, representation failure is a necessary condition for populist success, and this is the first hypothesis that will be tested in this paper. The remaining differences between the two approaches may be fleshed out by distinguishing majoritarian and what may be called “segmented” populism. In the first type, presumably present in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, as well as Greece and Spain, the legitimacy gap is wide. The populist electoral coalition is therefore large and correspondingly diverse in ideological terms. The appeal of the second type is restricted to rather specific segments of the electorate that perceive a failure of democratic representation because their specific preferences are not represented in the party system. A prominent example is the electoral coalition rallied by the populist right in Western Europe. These hypotheses are tested based on an in-depth analysis of two Latin American and two Western European cases. First, combining data on party positions with mass-level surveys, I show that a representation failure represents a necessary condition both for left-wing and right-wing populist success. Second, I show that left-wing populist voters in Latin America and right-wing populist voters in Europe differ in the degree to which they display homogenous outlooks in terms of “thick” ideologies their parties are associated with: Majoritarian populism in Latin America rallies ideologically diverse groups, while segmented populism in Western Europe find support almost exclusively among ideologically like-minded voters.