Are They Populist, After All? Populism and Party Preferences in East Asia

• In Event: Elections and Voting Behavior Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Elections and Voting Behavior: Electoral Campaigns, Systems, and Strategy Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

In the effort to study populism worldwide, scholars have found (pseudo-)populists in East Asia to organise their discourse and actions along different lines than in Western countries. It has been argued that political actors emerging in East Asia in defence of people’s interests fail to meet strictly ‘populist’ classification requirements given they identify specific actors, rather than the generic elites, as enemy. However, we know little about the relationship between voters and populism. As the Manichean divide between the ‘good people’ and the ‘corrupt elite’ is not central to the political discourse, we could expect people-centrism and anti-elitism attitudes (i.e. populist attitudes) to be unimportant in the minds of voters. On the other hand, recent political mobilisations in Taiwan and Hong Kong—especially among the younger population—have reflected a discontent with the establishment that might have boosted feelings of resentment towards the status quo. This paper argues that anti-elitism attitudes do shape voter electoral preferences in East Asia, despite the lack of an evident anti-elite rhetoric at the party level.
To study this, we select the cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong, where populism has assumed the form of an ethno-territorial cleavage (i.e., being in favour or opposed to integration with China). We study whether populist attitudes have an impact on voters’ electoral preferences, while controlling for the effects of ethnic identity, ideological proximity to the party, and other relevant policy issue considerations (i.e., economic and cultural). Relying on data from Module 5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral System, we test our hypotheses by means of linear regression models conducted on a stacked form dataset to study the preferences (i.e., electoral utilities) for all parties at once. Results suggest that, controlling for all other factors, elite considerations do have a significant impact on individual party support in both cases. Moreover, the effect of populist attitudes appears to kick in more strongly in the case of support for pro-independence parties. This paper demonstrates that anti-elite attitudes often described as a key driver of unconventional protest in Taiwan and Hong Kong are also reflected in more conventional modes of participation, i.e., in voters’ electoral preferences. Although populism at the party level is mobilised and structured according to different patterns than in Western countries, voters in their electoral calculus rely on considerations that do not differ much from those in Western electorates.

Authors

• Marta Gallina

• Lewis Alexander Luartz, University of California, Riverside

• Stefano Camatarri, Université catholique de Louvain