Back to the future? Populism and the Legacies of Authoritarian Regimes

Over the last decade, the populist radical right has surged across the world as one of the major threats to liberal democratic principles such as pluralism, media freedom, and minorities’ protection. How can we make sense of the normalization of the populist radical right? With democratic countries backsliding towards authoritarianism and populist radical right parties becoming increasingly successful in elections even in countries that were considered immune to the radical right, it is crucial to understand why the stigma associated with past authoritarian regimes no longer seems to serve as an antidote to the populist radical right. The project “Back to the future? Populism and the Legacies of Authoritarian Regimes (POLAR)” sets to investigate the normalization of the populist radical right in Spain and Portugal analyzing how the fading stigmatization of the authoritarian past and the accommodative stance of the media contribute to lend legitimacy to radical right parties. To do so, the project will field a representative online survey in Spain and Portugal with a set of questions about nostalgia and evaluation for the authoritarian past and a survey experiment intended to measure the levels of stigmatization of that past. Moreover, POLAR will perform a content analysis of newspaper articles to determine whether different media strategies contribute to the normalization or the stigmatization of the far right in the public sphere.