Assessing the Social Base for Right-Wing Populism in Eastern Europe

• In Event: Democratic Stability and Backsliding

Abstract

Democratic principles have been challenged worldwide in the past decade as leaders with authoritarian tendencies win elections and assume power. In post-communist Europe, where liberal democracy is still not well entrenched, the juxtaposition of demonized elites and an idealized people as the lowest common denominator of populism has been particularly successful, resulting in populist varieties such as the Czech ‘technocratic’, Polish and Hungarian ‘paternalist’ and Serbian ‘ethno-nationalist’ populism. There are two main competing scholarly explanations to the rise of right-wing populists. The supply-side arguments posit that it is the political leadership’s manipulations of the rules of the game and institutional ‘hijacking’ that have led to their repeated victories in elections in the last decade. Such scholarship usually refers to the case of Fidesz of Viktor Orbán in Hungary and his institutional innovations to make the case that his popularity is manufactured rather than widespread. On the contrary, those who favor the demand-side explanations argue that a confluence of socioeconomic, cultural and international factors after 1989 has resulted in an electorate that prefers strong autocratic and populist leaders with little care for liberal democracy and its values. Here, the case of the Polish Law and Justice Party is put forward as an example of populism that follows the views of a populace with traditionalist values. Although such propositions are hardly binary and exclusionary, our aim is to analyze to what extent such propositions hold in Eastern Europe.

To contribute to these discussions, we break new ground by offering a methodologically innovative and detailed analysis of how popular values changed in the region since 2008 and subsequently track them against elections and populist party profiles. We utilize survey data on social values and granularly dissected electoral data to analyze the social (popular) base for populism. Our main question is to what extent have top-down efforts of populist leaders and parties created demand for populism across Eastern Europe, and what has been the bottom-up demand for populist politics? Focusing on illiberal and right-wing populists across Eastern Europe (from the Baltics to the Balkans) who are defined by the defense of nation, people, country; protectionist economic policies; opposition towards the west and liberal values such as multiculturalism, LGBT+ rights and environmentalism, we study whether their electoral scores were due to a change in social values or whether populist agendas induced a change in values.

We use two sets of European Value Survey data (from 2008 and 2018) that cover the entire region to assess how popular sentiments have changed once populists were in power and whether success of populist leaders (and parties) is greater where populist values were more widespread in 2008. These two databases offer good insights in how a decade of populist leadership has affected popular values by comparing responses in 2008, i.e., before widespread populism and before the financial and migration crises exploded, and in 2018, when a large number of East European countries already had a populist government. We then study the Chapel Hill Expert Survey Data (as well as the Populist and Manifesto databases) to look at changes in party scores on measures of green/alternative/leftist versus traditional/authoritarian/nationalist attitudes during these periods and what programs the parties had. Analyzing trends in these data allows us to track the extent to which parties promoted populism over the decade. Finally, we include micro-case studies of Hungary and the Czech Republic to tease out some of the more nuanced explanations for a populist social base by using existing research and the regular iterations of the European Social Survey (repeated every two years). These two country cases offer situations where a populist government has successfully been in power for over a decade (Hungary) as well as where populists have recently lost elections (Czech Republic), allowing us to tease out rhetorical strategies by parties during elections and the incorporation of populist elements into their profiles.

Authors

• Jessie Barton Hronesova, UNC - CHAPEL HILL

• Robert M. Jenkins, University of North Carolina