Institutional aspects and social bases of populism in Greece since the 1980s

In the majority of relevant studies, national-populism is analyzed from a 'political supply-side' perspective, i.e. it is approached as a collection of attitudes, perceptions and practices that pertain primarily to political elites. This study aims to highlight the opposing aspect, i.e. to analyze national-populism from the perspective of 'political demand'. The structure of the study is basically composed of two different levels of analysis. The first one is an attempt to define and delineate national-populism as an ideological phenomenon in contemporary Greece. The second one is to empirically test hypotheses which posit that members of particular socioeconomic, demographic and political groupings constitute the most common bearers of 'national-populist attitudes'. Main aim is to gauge whether we can observe different trends between the period before the onset of the economic crisis with the period of the bailout agreements, austerity and recession. Our analysis stretches from 1985 to 2015. We are using data both from the Greek surveys of the True European Voter (TEV) project and the Hellenic National Election Studies (ELNES) of 2009, 2012 and 2015.