A Very Unpolitical Engagement? A Cross-National Study on Populist Non-Electoral Participation

Amid increasing electoral instability across Europe, the scholarship on populism has grown at an exponential rate. Largely a by-product of theoretical discussions on a Manichean division of the socio-political realm, populism has remained long confined to the study of the supply side of politics, whereby parties’ and movements’ populism was read through the various ideas attached to this ‘thin ideology’. Demand-side accounts have recently taken foothold to explain what motivates populist vote. Such analyses have been essentially concerned with the profile of populist radical-right and radical-left voters and their discontent. With our paper, we wish to focus on a neglected aspect of populist mobilisation, i.e. non-electoral participation (NEP), and elaborate on how populist voters engage politically outside the polling station. On the one hand, we want to challenge the notion that discontent with the political elites would solely resolve into voting for populist parties, hence providing a broader understanding of populist mobilisation. On the other, we seek to unveil differentiated patterns of NEP for populist voters of different ideological persuasions—the underlying idea being that populist parties and movements of the left and right originate from different political experiences and, thus, engage politically in different ways. In order to test our hypotheses, we rely on a unique cross-national survey administered to representative samples across nine European countries.