Comparative Analysis of Populist Attitudes in the Czech Republic and Germany

The paper investigates populist attitudes in the Czech Republic and Germany. It draws from German election study from 2017 and Czech survey of populist attitudes from 2018. The aim of the analysis is exploratory and it stems from the debate about exclusionary vs. inclusionary nature of populism. It was been proposed by Mudde and Kaltwasser that it is possible to identify two subtypes of populism: exclusionary (right-wing) in Europe and inclusionary in Latin America. The idea of the paper is to look at popular attitudes in Germany and Czech Republic and find out whether there exists just one type or profile of populist attitudes (the hypothesis is the exclusionary one) or whether there is a variety of attitudes not limited to right-wing exclusionary form of populism. For the analysis of German and Czech data it is used latent class model (LCA) to identify various sources of populist sentiment in popular attitudes in these two countries. The analysis shows several findings. First, populist attitudes are associated with various political ideologies (right, centrist and left) as suggests the thin notion of populism: In these two European countries there are popular populist attitudes associated with non extreme right-wing values. Second, while populist attitudes are associated with exclusionary attitudes (to outgroups, to European union), in Germany there is also populist sentiment associated with inclusionary values. The analysis on general level corroborates the idea of inclusionary and exclusionary populism proposed by Mudde and Kaltwasser. However, it also shows diversity of populist attitudes between and within the studied countries. The contribution of this paper is that while the idea of exclusionary and inclusionary populism was proposed theoretically, in this analysis it is tested on the level of popular attitudes.