Populist Opportunity Structures in Multi-Party Competition

• In Event: Anti-Elite Strategies in Multi-Party Competition

Abstract

In this paper, we make use of data from political parties’ Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to investigate when they take more populist positions. While an increasing amount of research investigates populist ideology as a driving phenomenon of the politics of advanced capitalist societies, only little research addresses the strategic incentives for parties to take more populist positions. Here, we thus conceptualize the costs and benefits associated with a populist strategy. We argue that while populist strategies can be helpful in mobilizing anti-elite sentiment, they are not free of costs. Specifically, since populist claims erode people’s acceptance of pluralist ideas such as political compromise or constraints to majority will, they exacerbate government parties’ potential to successfully govern. We should thus expect government parties to make much less use of populist rhetoric. In addition, opposition parties that have not governed or do not expect to govern any time soon, should be much more likely to take populist positions than other opposition parties. In terms of opportunities, populist positions should generally be more likely under conditions where governments can be successfully presented as non-responsive to the “will of the people”. We test these expectations making use of an original new data set. In order to measure parties’ populist positions, we apply supervised machine learning techniques to crowd coded social media (Facebook and Twitter) posts of parties and party leaders between 2007 and 2016. We analyze how government status as well as the share of years previously spent in government affect parties’ propensity to take more populist positions. In order to measure government responsiveness, we match most important problem data from the Eurobarometer with data on government agendas from the CAP. Our analysis thus makes an important contribution to integrating populist ideology into research on the dynamic and strategic behavior of political parties in multi-party competition.

Authors

• Tarik Abou-Chadi, University of Zurich

• Pablo Barbera, University of Southern California

• Hauke Licht, University of Zurich, Political Science Department