Are Radical-Right Populist Parties Only Bad for Some Democracies?

• In Event: Liberal Democracy in an Age of Populism

Abstract

The rise of radical right populist parties (RRPPs) across Europe has raised a number of concerns. Apart from RRPPs’ questionable stance on immigration, one of the most important of these regards the consequences for the democratic political system: does the rise of RRPPs endanger the stability and functioning of democracy? With recent developments in Hungary and Poland, where populist parties and politicians in government have begun to dismantle the very core of liberal democracy, these concerns have taken a new and perhaps unprecedented urgency. At the same time, however, other European democracies like Austria or Norway, where RRPPs are also in government, have so far not shown similar signs of disintegration. One of the reasons why some countries are facing tendencies of democratic backsliding while others are not could be the reservoir of trust citizenries extend to their democratic political system. For decades, scholars have considered political trust as essential for the smooth functioning and stability of democracy (e.g., Easton 1965; Hetherington 1998; Letki 2006; Putnam 1993; Zmerli and Hooghe 2011). If we want to assess how the growing strength of RRPPs will affect the democratic political system, we should thus take a closer look at how citizens’ attitudes change in reaction to this rise of RRPP.

While we already know that voters of RRPPs tend to be less trusting of the political system’s core representative institutions and express more skepticism towards the democratic system itself (Dahlberg and Linde 2017; Söderlund and Kestilä‐Kekkonen 2009), we know little about how the electoral success of RRPPs affects political trust in the general public. Will citizens always become disenchanted with and lose trust in the political system or are there certain conditions that may actually result in an increase of political among the majority of citizens, i.e. are there contextual characteristics that can mitigate the effect of RRPP success?

This contribution looks at three central contextual characteristics: democratic quality, corruption control, and government performance. All three of these can potentially moderate the effect of RRPP success on political trust. With RRPPs’ rhetoric often accusing established politicians and parties of “not caring what ordinary people think” and “lining their own pockets”, the extent to which real-world democracies lend themselves to such criticism may be crucial for how well this rhetoric resonates with citizens. If democratic quality is lacking, corruption is rampant, and government performance in the economic, administrative, or other realms is mediocre at best, citizens may see the RRPP criticism as valid and, consequently, political trust may decline more rapidly in response. In contrast, democracies that do not lend themselves as easily to such criticism because they offer a high level of democratic quality, effectively control corruption, and deliver convincing performance in the form of, for example, economic growth, solid welfare benefits, or high-quality public administration, should be more resilient to RRPP rhetoric as citizens’ experiences with the political system directly contradict these accusations..

This study combines ParlGov data (Döring and Manow 2018) on the electoral success of RRPPs with survey data from the European Social Survey (2002-2016) as well as aggregate data from the Varieties-of-Democracies project (Coppedge et al. 2018) and the World Development Indicators (World Bank 2018). It employs a multi-level difference-in-difference design to investigate how political trust has changed in relation to the growing success of RRPPs and how democratic quality, corruption control, and government performance have moderated this relationship in 32 European democracies.

In answering under what contextual conditions RRPP success has the least detrimental effect on political trust, this project further can help us gain insight into how democracies may be able to deal with the new realities of populism and populist radical right parties. As long as citizen support for the present political system – liberal, representative democracy – remains high, we have reason to be optimistic about the future: radical right populist parties should not be able to dismantle democracy easily against the will of the population. It is therefore essential to identify the contextual characteristics that condition the effects of RRPP success on citizens’ trust in the political system. Only if we know whether, for instance, a higher democratic quality can mitigate the negative effects of the rise of RRPPs can we develop policy recommendations aimed at strengthening support for the democratic political system and at inoculating publics to both RRPP rhetoric and disenchantment with the political system.

Author

• Marlene Mauk, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences