In the Name of the People and God: Religion and Populist Parties

Although “populism” has become another buzzword to describe the ascendancy of leaders and parties in a wide range of countries from Hong Kong to Russia, many studies lump a large number of parties together without distinguishing their distinct ideological content and extrapolating broad findings from select regions. In order to better assess the parties clustered as populists, this analysis develops one of the most comprehensive and updated data set that crosses regional and religious boundaries. While there are increasing efforts to create populism data set they are often limited to a region (e.g., Europe or Latin America) or limit themselves to a certain time frame (pre-2000) e.g., thus failing to offer cross-regional current analyses. Drawing on the content analysis of the political statements of parties and leaders exhibit the main characteristics of “populist” discourse, the paper analyzes more than 80 populist parties that gained political power after the year 2000. Our coding focuses a large set of variables including each party’s leadership type, targeted out-group, the use of religion, policy platforms, and conditions of their emergence. Our original data set enables us to probe into whether and how populist parties take different forms depending on the dominant religion of the country and the presence/absence of a charismatic leadership. By expanding the geographical and temporal boundaries of existing data sets, our analysis answers hitherto unexplored questions such as how populist parties differ in the way they approach religion, use religious ideas, if their approach to religion have any impact on the ways in which they focus on external enemies (as opposed to internal ones), their parties’ governing strategies.