Cueing to the Extreme: Populist Voter Attitudes in Europe and the United States

• In Event: Public Attitudes toward Populism

Abstract

The rise of populism in Europe and the US has attracted scholarly attention to populist leaders and their political parties. At its core, populism implies the rejection of career politicians and mainstream policies that cater to the privileged class, along with an insistence that everyday individuals are more qualified to make political decisions that impact society. While populism is largely a catch-all term, it is most frequently associated with radical-right parties. Left-wing populism is largely underexplored, although the electoral success of SYRIZA in Greece and the popularity of Bernie Sanders in the US highlight that populism can take on a distinctly left-wing character. As Halikiopoulou et al. (2012) show, both radical right and left parties invoke national identity in their platforms, thereby creating a common ground between the two ostensibly disparate movements. At the same time, the study of populism/radicalism has focused on political elites, while the attitudes of populist voters have gone mainly uncharted.

This paper contributes to the discussion of Western populism in several ways. First, it examines the platforms of both radical right and left parties in Europe and the US by focusing on their commonalities. It does so by examining data from the Comparative Manifestos Project. Second, it evaluates the extent to which the attitudes of radical voters actually align with the platforms of radical parties. Using the World Values Survey, it assesses how radical voters perceive the role of the government and strong leadership, as well as their trust in mainstream institutions. Furthermore, it evaluates the “who is cueing who?” phenomenon by tracing the degree to which voters are responsive to changes in party platforms and vice-versa. One of the key questions under investigation is whether parties have shifted to more to the extremes of the political left-right spectrum, thereby “pulling along” the average voter. Alternatively, voters may have become more radical as a result of forces such as globalization and heightened income inequality. Therefore, what we may be witnessing is shift in the voters, who “pull along” the parties, which aim at maximizing their vote share. I contend that the directionality of cueing differs between Europe and the US. In the US, the Republican Party, specifically the Tea Party fringe, have radicalized the American electorate. In Europe, the voters have taken on more radical attitudes given the failure of centrist parties to deliver meaningful economic gains to the lower and middle classes.

Author

• Anna Brigevich