Anti-Elite Strategies in Multi-Party Competition

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel investigates the dynamics of populist anti-elite strategies in multi-party competition. Anti-elitism and populism have shaped the politics of advanced capitalist societies in the past decades and have led to increased scholarly attention. Scholars have investigated causes and consequences of populist and other challenger parties’ success. As recently noted by Mudde and Kaltwasser (2018), however, the analysis of populist politics and the success of anti-establishment parties has happened quite independently of other main theories of party competition such as spatial or issue competition models. In this panel, we thus try to analyze parties’ anti-elite strategies within a broader framework of the strategic behavior of political parties within multi-party competition. In order to achieve this goal our panel brings forward novel conceptual approaches as well as methodological innovations that allow us to more properly investigate the political dynamics surrounding populist and anti-elite appeals. The contributions by de Vries, Hobolt and van der Velden as well as by Abou-Chadi, Barbera and Licht present novel methods to measure populist and anti-elite appeals in manifestos and social media posts respectively. Conceptually both papers address the question of under what conditions political parties chose anti-elite strategies. The two other papers more broadly focus on the transformations of democratic representation and mass-elite policy linkages as it is affected by the increasing success of new challenger parties. Spoon and Williams investigate how challenger parties compete on the economic dimension, especially focusing on the Green party family. Moving beyond programmatic politics, Gidron, Adams and Horne analyze the dynamics of affective polarization in multi-party democracies. Our panel thus contributes to the study of anti-elite politics by analyzing causes and consequences of anti-elite strategies alike. Building on these papers, scholars should find many avenues for more fruitful analyses integrating populist politics into existing approaches of multi-party competition.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 35: Political Organizations and Parties

Cosponsor

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Chair

• Rafaela Dancygier Princeton University

Discussant

• Lawrence Ezrow University of Essex

Individual Presentations

• Going Against the Grain: Anti-Establishment Rhetoric in Europe - Catherine E. De Vries, Free University Amsterdam; Sara B Hobolt, London School of Economics; Mariken van der Velden, Free University Amsterdam

• Populist Opportunity Structures in Multi-Party Competition - Tarik Abou-Chadi, University of Zurich; Pablo Barbera, University of Southern California; Hauke Licht, University of Zurich, Political Science Department

• Affective Polarization in Western Multi-party Systems - Noam Gidron, Hebrew University; James Adams, University of California, Davis; Will Horne, Princeton University

• To Moderate or Not: When New Politics Parties Take On Old Politics Issues - Jae-Jae Spoon, University of Pittsburgh; Christopher J. Williams, University of Arkansas at Little Rock