Disadvantaged and Powerless or Resentful and Empowered: What Makes People Vote for Parties with Populist Rhetoric?

In my presentation, I address the association of perceptions of individual and group relative deprivation, internal and external political efficacy with voting for parties with populist rhetoric. My contribution is threefold. First, even though the effect of perceptions of relative deprivation on populism has been addressed in literature (e.g., Gidron & Hall, 2016, Elchardus & Spruyt, 2016), there is no evidence whether individual or group-level perceptions of relative deprivation relate more to populism. Second, I contribute by adding political efficacy to the model. Internal political efficacy provides individuals with a feeling that they can make a positive influence on their disadvantaged situation. However, the results on its relation to populism are controversial (e.g., Rico et al., 2020; Lytkina & Reeskens, 2022). External political efficacy stands for the responsiveness of the political system and has been found to strongly relate to populism (e.g., Geurkink et al., 2020). Third, I check whether the proposed mechanism replicates across different European societies. To do so, I perform multilevel analysis for 25 European countries using the European Social Survey (Round 9, 2018) data with imputed scores of populist rhetoric taken from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (2014, 2017, 2019). I found that both, perceptions of individual and group relative deprivation, positively relate to voting for parties which employ populist rhetoric. External political efficacy negatively relates to support for parties using populist rhetoric, and internal political efficacy is associated with a higher level of support for parties employing populist rhetoric. At the country level, people are more likely to vote for parties employing populist rhetoric if populist parties are in government. Additionally, affluence at the country level relates to lower support for parties with anti-elitist rhetoric; however, this effect is less prominent among people perceiving individual or group-level relative deprivation.