Abstract
The present research investigates the individual and aggregate level determinants of support for thin-centred ideology parties across 23 European countries. Employing a multilevel modelling approach, we analysed European Social Survey data round 7 2014 (N = 44000). Our findings show that stronger identification with one's country and confidence in one's ability to influence the politics positively but perceiving the system as satisfactory and responsive; trusting the institutions and people, and having positive attitudes toward minorities, i.e., immigrants and refugees, negatively predict support for populist and single issue parties. The level of human development and perceptions of corruption at the country level moderate these effects. Thus, we provide the first evidence that the populist surge is triggered by populist actors' capacity to simultaneously invoke vertical, "ordinary" people against "the elites", and horizontal, "us" against "threatening aliens", categories of people as well as the sovereignty of majority over minorities. These categories and underlying social psychological processes of confidence, trust, and threats are moderated by the general level of human development and corruption perceptions in a country. It is, therefore, likely that voting for populist parties will increase as the liberally democratic countries continue to prosper and offer better opportunities for human development. Stronger emphasis on safeguarding the integrity of the economic and democratic institutions, as our findings imply, and preserving their ethical and honest, i.e., un-corrupt, nature can keep this surge under check.
Highlights
In this study, we focus on the rise of populism in liberal democracies in Europe
We focus on how these individual processes interact with country level factors such as human development opportunities (HDI) and corruption perceptions influence populist voting. such as attachment to one’s country
The outline we provide above suggest that support for populist parties is a co-product of core social psychological processes, i.e., social identity, trust, satisfaction with the system, perceptions of efficacy, attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, and structural factors, level of affluence and the corresponding opportunities for human development as well corruption perceptions
Summary
We focus on the rise of populism in liberal democracies in Europe. We define populism as a two-dimensional framework of ideas [1], that includes but not limited to simultaneous invocation of vertical, “ordinary” people against “the elites”, and horizontal, “us” against “threatening aliens”, categories of people as well as the sovereignty of majority over minorities, and overprotective anti-institutionalism that purports to protect economic and cultural rights of “people” against threats from top, bottom, or from outside [1–3]. The outline we provide above suggest that support for populist parties is a co-product of core social psychological processes, i.e., social identity, trust, satisfaction with the system, perceptions of efficacy, attitudes toward immigrants and refugees, and structural factors, level of affluence and the corresponding opportunities for human development as well corruption perceptions. We incorporate these country level dynamics to our conceptual model and deduce several testable hypotheses that might explain the rise of populist parties with a thin ideological base. Our decision is to depart from unidimensional indicators of wealth and inequality (namely GDP per capita, Gini coefficient, net migration rate, social welfare expenditure by country, respectively) employed by previous research [15] and focus instead on the subjective experience at individual and aggregate level and a multidimensional measures of human development (HDI) and corruption perceptions
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