Fighting corruption in the name of the people: Exploring the link between regional quality of governance and support for populist parties in Europe

This paper addresses an issue previously neglected in the research on support for populist parties: How do perceptions of the quality of governance and local service delivery affect voters’ propensity to vote for a populist party? Previous research has shown that perceptions of high corruption decrease citizens’ trust in democratic and political institutions. I argue that lower trust in democratic institutions make citizens more susceptible to the message of populist parties. That is, I argue that lower institutional trust resulting from poor quality of governance makes voters more likely to resonate with political messages that are anti-establishment, anti-elite, that portray “the people” as virtuous, and advocate popular sovereignty as opposed to elitist rule. Drawing upon the work on populist parties in Europe by Van Kessel (2015) I use individual level data from the Quality of Government institute to assess citizens’ perception of the quality of regional governance and their intentions to vote for a populist party. I also use European regional level data together with country fixed-effects to test the link between regional quality of governance and the vote share of populist parties. The empirical results show support for my hypothesis: even after controlling for a wide range of relevant individual level variables a strong association between perceived quality of governance and the propensity to vote for a populist party remains. Similarly, even after taking relevant regional variables like economic development and unemployment into account, I find a strong association between regional quality of governance and the vote share of populist parties. These findings have implications for the research debate on support for populist parties and for the overall debate on democracy and quality of governance.