Bring it Back to ‘the People’! Notions of National and European Citizenship and Voting for Populist Parties in Europe

Globalization and European integration increasingly challenge the concept of national citizenship through the development of a supranational citizenship often associated with the European Union. While nation, states, and borders gradually lose their political and societal significance, the idea of a European and post-national citizenship generates counter-movements within European societies. These counter-movements fuel the rise of populist parties claiming to bring power back to the national sovereign – ‘the people’. The emerging societal and political clash developed around the significance of the national and the European citizenship and is mainly related to the ethnic, cultural, and civic conditions associated with the democratic privilege of citizenship. To illustrate; while left-wing and libertarian parties predominantly support the idea of multiculturalism, right-wing and authoritarian nativist parties define citizenship mainly through ethnic components. Despite the central relevance of the conception of ‘the nation’ for the ideology of populist parties, voter’s notions of citizenship are hardly taken into account in empirical research of voting behavior. In addition, it is not clear to what extent the concept of ‘the people’ differs among the supporters of left-wing and right-wing populist parties. In our article we therefore raise the following questions; how do notions of national and European citizenship differ between voters of left-wing and right-wing populist parties and how do these ideas impact citizens’ voting behavior for populist parties in Europe? In our analysis, we employ a Bayesian statistical analysis to analyze data from the pre-release of the European Values Study (EVS) 2017. This article adds important new findings on the relevance of notions of citizenship for the voting behavior of populist parties and thus for the field of European politics as well as political sociology and psychology.