Populism in Narratives

The rise of populist parties poses a significant challenge for scholars of politics. In addition to policy and economic-driven explanations recent studies pointed at identity-driven explanations for the rise of support in populist parties. However, the empirical evaluation of identity-driven explanation makes a very difficult challenge. In line with the focus on identity explanations to the rise of populism, this research suggests a theoretical and empirical path using narrative theory. The paper suggests that the incentives to vote for populist parties are rooted, at list partly, in the ways voters tell their national story. Therefore, this study seeks to understand the potential effects of voters’ national story on their likelihood to vote for populist parties. Specifically, we ask whether one can predict vote for radical right populist parties if one knows voters’ national story. We proceed by the examination of three regularities in the literature on populism. According to one such regularity, populist voters are antisystem voters who fundamentally reject the political establishment. Their distrust in political institutions lead them to question the willingness and capacity of established parties to address their grievances. This direction rests upon previous works claiming that populist parties mobilize potential voters by fueling resentment and anger tapping on their outsiderness. In another view populist voters are backsliding against “the corrupt elite” who took the country too far to the liberal pole in the liberal democracy continuum. These voters hold conservative values based on law and order and family values. They have reverted to nationalist values of exclusion and discrimination, opposing elites’ global and universalistic values. A third logic presented in the literature is that populist voters feel that their interests and preferences have been left politically underrepresented by political parties. They are frustrated issue voters who wish to achieve key policy outcomes. We adapt these hypotheses to expectation on the type of national stories embraced by populist voters. We rely on original representative election surveys conducted between 2012 and 2016 in Denmark, Netherlands, the United States and the United Kingdom. All surveys were administered in the respondents’ native language and incorporated items on a wide set of issues, including story-related questions and vote choice. We try to evaluate the explanatory power of each of the three hypotheses. Preliminary findings show that voters for populist parties do not differ in their story composition from voters of mainstream parties, or from economic elites. But they do however issue motivated as they emphasize different future aspirations for their country.