Populist Voting like Pineapple Pizza: Economic Insecurity Soutdough, Special Cultural Ingredient Spiced by Institutional Trust

As the growth of economic inequality between 2008 and 2018 slowly became the reality not only for the major Western countries (as exemplified by France and the US), but also the likes of Lithuania (GINI score: 0.37 –third highest in Europe), Hungary (center-periphery divide, growing GINI) and Poland (regional disparities) as well, the long-term success of populist politicians seems to be more salient. In the debate on the cause of the rise of populism between culturalists (Norris & Inglehart, 2018) and economists (Guisoet.al., 2017) issues surrounding the deepening of economic inequality as the main socioeconomic cleavage plays the key role in both. However, do we understand it well? Is GINI the only measures to be used in the political context? The paper proposes two goals: (1) to introduce a new index of economic insecurity (2) test the hypothesis that: changes in economic insecurity have a stronger and more consistent effect on individual support for populist parties, when institutional trust is in place acting as a moderator variable (interaction term). The goal is achieved by testing the hypothesis using multilevel modelling of the data for a sample of European countries. The newly proposed Ivanov index of economic insecurity embeds concepts of social class, job and income insecurity. The findings point to the fact that when an individual is highly economically insecure, trust in institutions does not alter their decision to vote for populist parties. However, the same cannot be said about less economically secure and those who are on the opposite side of the scale –the secure ones who are economically better-off. Institutional trust becomes paramount for them in their voting choice for anti-establishment populist parties and, the more trustful they are in political parties, politicians, legal system and the parliament, the less prone they are to vote for populists.