Populist Attitudes, Populist Discourse and Party Vote in Spain

The debt crisis has had profound effects on the politics of several European countries. In the countries that were most severely hit by the crisis widespread feelings of political discontent arose and trust in politicians dramatically decreased, as a reaction to the failure of parties and governments to respond successfully to the economic crisis. In the case of Spain the crisis led also to the emergence and rapid growth of new parties like Podemos or Ciudadanos. Political scenarios characterized by intense economic crises, policy failures, perceptions of widespread political corruption and crises in the responsiveness of party systems have been found quite favorable for the development of populist discourses. They aimed at setting strong and morally loaded divisions between common citizens and the social and political elites in (Hawkins 2009 and 2010) and to the political activation of pre-existing populist orientations. In this paper, we try to assess the role that populist discursive elements have played in the voting decisions of Spanish citizens in the 2015 general election. More precisely, our purpose is to assess the degree to which public populist orientations, in combination with programmatic preferences and non-policy factors, help to account for the voting decisions of Spanish citizens in the 2015. In order to conduct this analysis we use an online survey conducted in December 2015 that measures populist orientations (following Akkerman, Mudde and Zaslove 2013) and data on the populism of party discourses and platforms (as measured by Hawkins’s holistic grading technique).