Abstract
AbstractThis book review examines the theory of populism advanced by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart in Cultural Backlash. The authors offer a distinct explanation of the rise of authoritarian populism in advanced democracies. As societies become more liberal over time, older, more conservative cohorts feel under threat of losing majority status and allegedly turn towards authoritarian-populist parties that promise to stop the tide of liberalism. However, this theory of populism finds little empirical support. In contrast to what the authors argue, there is no polarization of attitudes between younger and older cohorts, and younger cohorts are more likely to vote for authoritarian-populist parties. To substantiate this claim, I replicate many of the analyses in Cultural Backlash and add additional ones with the newest wave of the European Social Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey. I conclude by observing that while the cultural backlash theory of populism does not hold, this does not invalidate cultural approaches more generally.
Highlights
Two of the world’s most-cited political scientists recently teamed up to tackle a pressing political issue: the rise of populism
As elsewhere in (Western) Europe, well above 10 per cent of its citizens today have foreign-born parents or grandparents. These transformations promote value change among younger cohorts – and pit them against the more socially conservative older ones: We argue that the slow process of value change arising from generational, educational, gender, and urban transformations have deepened cultural cleavages in many Western societies and changed the relative balance between liberalism and conservatism
If we look at the ordinary least squares (OLS) regression that seeks to explain libertarian values, the same picture emerges: for all cohorts, the estimated value is above 50 and ranges between 54 and 56.2 on a scale from 0 to 100
Summary
Two of the world’s most-cited political scientists recently teamed up to tackle a pressing political issue: the rise of populism. To support further the claim that older and younger cohorts differ on basic cultural attitudes, Norris and Inglehart use ten items from the Schwartz scale to measure authoritarian and liberal attitudes (Schwartz 1992).
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