Pop populism: ethno-traditionalism beyond national borders and the populist radical right

Abstract

We test the somewhat counter-intuitive expectation that support for populist radical right (PRR) parties at the national level is associated with public support for ethno-traditional cues—a frequent feature in PRR imagery and nativist discourse—abroad. We do so by leveraging a large-scale comparative dataset that covers voting patterns during the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) between 1999 and 2019. Looking at voting patterns for more than 30,000 country dyads (i.e., ESC points given by country A to country B in a given contest), we show that countries with stronger national support for PRR parties tend to vote more clearly for songs showcasing ethno-traditional cues (ethnic imagery and, in particular, the use of non-English national languages), even when accounting for cultural and regional ties and song characteristics. These results provide novel insights into the relationship between nativism, radical right populism, and perceptions of foreign ethno-traditionalism.