Patterns of Populism: Diverging or Converging Populism?

When populist parties emerged in the 1990s, scholars debated whether there was a unifying element among diverse political parties, i.e. the degree to which there was a new populist radical right party family. However, given recent developments there is reason to believe that this picture no longer holds. Populism has spread across countries and across the ideological dimensions. We find very different populist parties, ranging from the populist radical right parties to the left wing parties. These populist parties have different attaching ideologies and they often emphasize different aspects of populism, some are more anti-establishment while others have a less homogenous notion of the people and others are more antagonistic (Manichean) than others. In this paper we are interested in whether there are country specific and institutional contexts behind these different types of populism. In other words, can we determine different patterns of populism? Using a new and unique dataset (the POPPA dataset), we explore the degree to which we can identify different patterns of populism. The POPPA dataset scores all relevant political parties in European party systems using a continuous measure of populism and ideologies, allowing us to assess degrees of populism among all relevant parties in the party system across all European countries and across all party families. We anticipate that regional socio-economic differences, national identities, differences in party systems, and the diverse degrees of populist institutionalization may have an effect on the types of populisms that we find in the European context.