Economic Insecurity as a Cause for Populist Support in Central and Eastern Europe

Populism and populist leaders have been grabbing the headlines of the international media for the better part of the 2010s. The elections of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, the BREXIT referendum and Boris Johnson becoming Prime Minister, the growing popularity of populist discourse exemplified by the emergence of AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), National Rally (Rassemblement national), Northern League (Lega Nord) etc. have made these themes a common sight in politics. A stream of literature using econometric methods has analysed the connection between economic factors, cultural factors and the share of the populist vote, however the results have been mixed. While Inglehart and Norris (2016) found that cultural factors influence voters far more when voting for populist parties, Guiso et al., (2018) found the opposite: economic decline will influence voters to vote for populist parties. Within Central and Eastern Europe there is no shortage of populist parties: FIDESZ in Hungary and PiS in Poland seem to have cemented their position in government. This article wishes to add to the growing literature which explains the rise of populism due to economic reasons, through analysing the case of Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, this article investigates the connection between economic insecurity and support for populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe, using a panel dataset based on the European Social Survey and Eurostat, and a two-step Heckman probit estimation method. The article uses the concept for economic insecurity by Bossert and D’Ambrosio (2013, p. 1018), which argues that economic insecurity is “the anxiety produced by the possible exposure to adverse economic events and by the anticipation of the difficulty to recover from them”. The dependent variable of the model is people voting for populist parties, while the independent variables contains indicators which capture the objective and subjective fears of voters; the trust they have in various institutions; their attitudes on cultural factors and values they have such as respect, proper behaviour, traditions; and additional variables on education, wealth, occupation. The article finds, that while in certain cases the cultural factors can play a role in explaining the draw of populist parties, the economic factors play a far larger role in explaining the reasons why FIDESZ and PiS are in power.