Beyond Populism: Anti-establishment Contestation between General Will, Technocratic Expertise and Exceptional Political Vocation

Studies of ‘thin’ anti-establishment political supply mainly assess the extent of populist messages. In this paper we measure the diversity of thin contestation beyond just populism. For this purpose, we deploy a content analysis of 142 social-media campaigns by conventional and anti-establishment parties (AEPs) during 23 elections across Europe 2010-2019. We find that in addition to popular will, AEPs invoked not only extra-political technocratic expertise, but primarily exceptional political vocation seen as necessary to revive an imagined ethos of formal-representative politics itself. Gradually, elitist appeals to extraordinary political calling, crafts and virtues became a major element of AEP thin supply. Additionally, regression analysis shows that unlike conventional parties, AEPs across the ideological spectrum which used more political vocation messages tended to perform better electorally ceteris paribus, while anti-establishment or general will rhetoric had mixed effects. In order to better understand recent political turbulence it is therefore useful to account for more diverse thin repertoire behind anti-establishment contestation.