The globalization of populism: patterns of diffusion, 1970-2019

Populism is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, scholars working on European countries as well as scholars working on Latin America frequently discuss the different waves of populism that have swept these regions. Invoking such imagery conjures up the question of whether diffusion of populism occurs and if so, under which conditions populism spreads from one country to another or even from one region to another. The impact of the Latin-American experience of Venezuela and Bolivia on the creation of the Spanish party Podemos, for instance, is well-documented (Gil 2015; De la Torre 2017), as are the close ties between Podemos and the Greek party Syriza (Leistner 2015). As populism is a distinct set of ideas about the nature of political competition, in line with Wolkenstein et al. (2020) we argue that diffusion of such principles about how power should be exercised, will be predominantly driven by emulation, i.e. the desire to imitate a successful adopter. Using the V-party data’s measure of a party’s level of populism rooted in the ideational approach, we take a dyadic approach and assess the effect of commonalities and sender/receiver attributes on the spread of this now global phenomenon for 851 parties in 62 countries from 1970s (or the year of transition) to 2019. We expect that earlier waves of populism will be linked to more idiosyncratic, within regional cross-national diffusion of successful populist frames. Yet, the increasing interconnectedness of a globalized world, resulting in perceived similarities of the effect of a neoliberal consensus driving inequality, a crisis of representation, and the surrendering of national sovereignty to international and supranational organizations, facilitated diffusion of populism across regions in the last wave.