The Mobilization of Populist Attitudes

This paper seeks to explain populist vote choice with an emphasis on the role of populist predispositions in a comparative perspective. Populist political attitudes constitute the breeding ground from which vote choice for populist parties may (or may not) result. Our analysis seeks to understand the conditions under which these attitudes are activated into support for populist parties or happen to be associated with other electoral choices. We consider conditioning factors at two levels. At the contextual level, the characteristics of the populist political supply (basically in terms of ideological stance and electoral strength and evolution) are expected to condition the mobilization of attitudes into populist choice, rather than to, for example, a mainstream opposition party or a non-populist radical party. Likewise, the presence of hard economic conditions and the experience of different parties in dealing with these are also expected to influence how populist predispositions affect voting behavior. At the individual level we expect political sophistication, emotional reactions to the economy and attachments to other parties to influence the likelihood of populist attitudes to be activated. To address this question we use survey data gathered in 2015 in nine European Countries within the Livewhat project (Greece, Italy, Spain, France, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Sweden). This set of countries offers variation in our main contextual variables: the characteristics of the electoral supply and in the degree of affectation by the economic crisis. To complement this analysis, we examine the changing relationship between populist predispositions and vote choice during the breakthrough of Podemos in Spain. For this we draw on an online panel survey carried out between 2010 and 2015 that allows us to track the activation of political discontent before and after the surprising results at the 2014 European elections.