Mass Polarization, Crumbling Institutional Trust and Democracy Eroding? Debunking Commonplace Crisis Narratives

The democratic backsliding literature sees reactionary ideological shifts as a reason for the success of right-wing populism (RWP)—shifts that supposedly have fueled citizens' distrust in democratic institutions and their readiness to support RWP in its efforts to cut back on democracy's liberal principles. However, the assumptions underlying this 'standard narrative’ of RWP’s rise are more often stated than tested. Filling this void, we analyze data from the EVS/WVS in a cross-national longitudinal design, covering all EU countries at two distant timepoints over the past 25 years. We test whether national publics experienced polarizing ideological shifts on four key value dimensions (right-vs-left on economic issues, nativism-vs-cosmopolitanism on immigration issues, patriarchy-vs-emancipation on sexual issues, economy-vs-environment on sustainability issues) to the effect that those segments at the reactionary end of these cleavages lost trust in institutions in ways that make them ready to sacrifice democracy's liberal principles. Our results provide no consistent confirmation that polarizing ideological shifts in the general population account for RWP's electoral rise. We conclude that the problems explaining RWP originate in democracies' institutional arrangements, namely representation deficits of growing non-voter camps and the rise of social media, which gave these non-voters a voice by disrupting established gate-keeping channels into politics.