Populist Parties in Europe

Agents of Discontent?

Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137414113
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Populism is a concept that is currently in vogue among political commentators and, more often than not, used pejoratively. The phenomenon of populism is typically seen as something adverse and, in the European context routinely related to xenophobic politics. What populism exactly is and who its main representatives are, however, often remains unclear. This text has two main aims: to identify populist parties in 21st century Europe and to explain their electoral performance. It argues that populist parties should not be dismissed as dangerous pariahs out of hand but rather that their rise tells us something about the state of representative democracy. The study has a broad scope, including populist parties of various ideological kinds – thus moving beyond examples of the 'right' – and covering long-established Western European countries as well as post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. It presents the results of an innovative mixed-methods research project, combining a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) of populist parties in 31 European countries with three in-depth case studies of the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom.

1

Introduction: Studying Populism in European Party Systems

I am deeply concerned about the divisions that we see emerging: political extremes and populism tearing apart the political support and the social fabric that we need to deal with the crisis; disunion emerging between the centre and the periphery of Europe; a renewed demarcation line being drawn between the North and the South of Europe; prejudices re-emerging and again dividing our citizens.

José Manuel Barroso¹

It may be clear that populism, a term used in the gloomy prognosis of former European Commission President Barroso, is often associated with developments which are deemed adverse, or even dangerous. Particularly since the dawn of the financial and economic crisis in 2008, various European political actors have expressed their concern about the rise of populism, more often than not associating the concept with political extremism and xenophobia. Yet what precisely constitutes this ‘populism’, and which political actors embody it, is often left unsaid. This book aims to clarify the manifestation of populism in European politics between 2000 and 2013. The focus is on political parties, which are still the key actors in contemporary European politics in terms of democratic representation. I first aim to apply the concept of populism to party systems across the continent and to identify parties that stand out from the others in terms of their consistent expression of a populist discourse. Second, I seek to explain the electoral performance of those ‘populist parties’ in national elections. Does the success of these parties in Europe denote a reactionary and destructive mood, as certain commentators and representatives of the political elites would like us to believe, or is this interpretation incomplete, or even flawed?

It is something of a cliché to start a text on populism with the observation that agreement on a definition is lacking and that the term is used for many different types of actors through time and space. Although this may still be true, there has been a surge in academic contributions on populism in recent years, and many scholars – at least those who apply the concept with care – tend to talk about the same phenomenon when they use the term. Populism is generally associated with a Manichean vision of society (pitting the good ‘people’ against the corrupted ‘elites’), a conception of ‘the people’ as a homogeneous entity, and a defence of popular sovereignty (see e.g. Taggart 2000; Mudde 2004; Abts and Rummens 2007; Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008a). While many scholars broadly agree on what populism is, it is still debated in what form populism manifests itself. Disagreement exists about whether populism can best be seen as a strategy, a style or a political ideology. This, in turn, makes it unclear whether the term ‘populism’ denotes an ideological attribute of a bounded set of political actors, or whether it constitutes an (opportunistic) rhetorical tool which can be applied by any politician. By relating the concept of populism to party systems in Europe and aiming to identify ‘full’ cases of populism, I seek to shed more light on this question.

Although the academic debate on populism may be well developed, in the vernacular sphere the term is applied in a less precise way (Bale et al. 2011). In the European context, populism is habitually associated with xenophobic politics and parties of the extreme or radical right (and therefore considered to be dangerous). This is not surprising, since populism in Western Europe has often been expressed by parties characterised by a nationalist and culturally conservative ideology, and hostility towards immigration and multiculturalism. The European academic literature has therefore also mainly considered populism as an element of ‘the right’ (see e.g. Betz 1994; Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Betz and Immerfall 1998; Mudde 2007). Populism, however, is not necessarily related to xenophobic politics or to any of the other properties of the radical right. Outside the European context, populism is actually often associated with politicians, parties and movements of a very different kind (see Ionescu and Gellner 1969; Canovan 1981; Taggart 2000; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). Although the focus of this study is on Europe only, this book also considers cases of populism beyond the radical right, as I am interested in the phenomenon of populism (expressed by political parties) in itself.

Another feature of the literature on populism in Europe is that, at least until fairly recently, it predominantly dealt with long-established democracies in Western Europe (e.g. Albertazzi and McDonnell 2008a). Although contributions have also emerged on populism in post-communist countries (e.g. Havlík et al. 2012), pan-European research projects have remained scarce. Since Central and Eastern European countries have been marked by the legacy of communism, it was difficult to provide a meaningful comparison between the party systems of long-established and post-communist European democracies. A quarter of a century has now passed since the post-communist countries’ transition to democracy, and many of these countries have joined the European Union. While it would be wrong to disregard the still prevailing differences, it now makes sense to compare parties and party systems across the whole of Europe. Cas Mudde (2007) and Luke March (2011) set an example in their studies on populist radical right and radical left parties, respectively. This book has a pan-European scope as well, and provides a systematic analysis of populism and the electoral performance of populist parties in party systems across the continent.

By taking this general approach, including populist parties with different ideological traits and analysing them in a wide variety of countries, it can be expected that the study will include cases that have little in common apart from their populism. This is in line with the notion that populist parties are ‘chameleonic’ in the sense that they adopt an ideological ‘colour’ and focus on issues relevant to their specific context (Taggart 2000). As far as their electoral performance is concerned, this study assesses whether, in spite of ideological differences, the success or failure of populist parties is dependent on the same logic. While many comparative studies on the electoral performance of populist or other radical ‘challenger’ parties have focused on institutional variables, the economic and political context, and positions of mainstream competitors, the role of the challenger parties themselves has often been overlooked (see Mudde 2007; 2010). This study explicitly concentrates on the electoral credibility of populist parties themselves. In addition to the presence of a conducive environment, the agency of populist parties is deemed crucial in explaining their electoral performance.

As will be discussed in more detail towards the end of this chapter, the electoral performance of populist parties in national elections will be assessed through a mixed-methods approach. My first analysis assesses populist party success and failure in 31 European countries (EU-28 plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland) by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) techniques. QCA can demonstrate how different (combinations of) explanatory conditions underlie the same outcome across various contexts. This is of crucial importance in view of the diversity of populist parties and countries studied in this book. After this analysis, the book continues with three qualitative case studies, which provide an in-depth analysis of populist parties and their competitors in the Netherlands, Poland and the United Kingdom. The first two countries have experienced the rise as well as the fall of populist parties since the start of the 21st century, while populist challengers have been unsuccessful in UK general elections up until 2010.

On the basis of the analyses in this book, several key messages can be formulated. First, it is important to avoid using the concept of populism too indiscriminately to describe or classify political parties. Some parties may voice populist rhetoric only sporadically and for a limited amount of time, and grouping these parties together with more genuine cases of populism leads to conceptual confusion and misclassification. Several post-communist countries, in particular, pose a challenge. Due to the more general presence of anti-establishment sentiments in many of these countries after their transition to democracy, it has been difficult to distinguish between populist and non-populist parties. As far as electoral performance is concerned, the rise of a populist party in a given country ought not to be seen as a mere reactionary backlash, but, rather, as the result of a perception that established political parties are unresponsive with regard to certain salient political themes. Populist parties, at the same time, only do well if they present themselves as credible alternatives to the political establishment. This means that researchers should pay more attention to the agency of populist parties in their effort to explain their success and failure. Populist parties are fairly ordinary players in the domain of party competition, and they should not be dismissed as dangerous pariahs out of hand, as their rise tells us something about the state of representative democracy (e.g. Canovan 1999; Mény and Surel 2002; Taggart 2002; Panizza 2005; Rovira Kaltwasser 2014).

The remainder of this chapter discusses the conceptual, theoretical and methodological starting points of this book. First, I provide a brief overview of the academic use of the concept ‘populism’, followed by a discussion on how populist parties can be defined and identified. I will then turn to my explanatory framework concerning the electoral performance of populist parties in Europe. The remaining section discusses the study’s research design and the outline of the book.

(Problems of) populism

The concept of populism is not new, but its application in scholarly contributions has witnessed a surge in the past few decades, especially where the European context is concerned. This surge followed the appearance of political parties in Western Europe which were often described as extreme or radical right-wing, and also ‘populist’ (e.g. Ignazi 1992; Betz 1994; Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Taggart 1996).² It is important to recognise that studies on populism in other parts of the world, such as the United States (e.g. Kazin 1998; Ware 2002) and Latin America (e.g. Weyland 2001; Roberts 2006; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013), include political actors of a different kind. As this book focuses on populist parties in Europe, the main aim of this concise literature overview is to outline the main issues faced when applying the concept in the European context. I will first introduce frequently identified elements of populism and several definitions, and then touch on discussions about the manifestation of populism and its relationship to democracy. In the subsequent section I will discuss in more detail the elements central to the definition of ‘populist parties’ I apply in this book.

Populism and its manifestation

One of the earliest accounts in which populism is described quite systematically is not devoted to the concept as such. Edward Shils (1956) discussed populism in his book on American security policies and associated anti-communist senator McCarthy with the term. According to Shils (1956: 101), populism is ‘tinged by the belief that the people are not just the equal of their rulers; they are actually better than their rulers and better than the classes – the urban middle classes – associated with the ruling powers’. Populists are highly sceptical of bureaucracy and impatient with institutional procedures, which supposedly hinder the direct expression of the popular will. Politicians would have to be ‘at best errand boys with little right to judgement on their own behalf if that judgement seems to contradict popular sentiment’ (Shils 1956: 103).

The ground-breaking edited volume of Ghiţa Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (1969) showed that the use of the concept was by no means restricted to the American context.³ The editors observed that populism was used to refer to actors from a wide range of countries and ideologies. In search for common elements of populism, the individual contributions touched on a range of cases, including the 19th-century movements in the US and Russia, and 20th-century populism in Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe. The various authors identified a broad range of populist attributes. Peter Wiles (1969: 166), for instance, argued that populism is based on the premise that ‘virtue resides in the simple people, who are the overwhelming majority, and in their collective traditions’. Wiles subsequently composed a long list of populist characteristics, including the notions that populist movements tend to be leader-centred, loosely organised, anti-intellectual, opposed to the establishment, and nostalgic in their dislike of the present and aim to ‘mould the further future in accordance with its vision of the past’ (Wiles 1969: 170). Similarly, Angus Steward (1969: 193) emphasised populism’s dislike of the state in its present form, and parliamentary politics in particular, and also spoke of the ‘charismatic’ leadership of populist movements. Peter Worsley (1969: 244–246), in turn, argued that populists stress the supremacy of ‘the will of the people’ and the desirability of popular participation in the political process. In the end, however, the Ionescu and Gellner volume showed a reluctance to provide a clear-cut definition of the concept.

In her study on populism, Margaret Canovan (1981) was also pessimistic about a single, globally applicable approach to populism. After having described a broad range of historical and more contemporary populist movements and politicians across the world, Canovan (1981: 133) argued that it is not possible ‘to unite all these movements into a single political phenomenon with a single ideology, program or socioenomic base’, and instead distinguished seven general categories of populism. In later work, Canovan further claimed that a single (explanatory) theory on populism would be ‘either too wide-ranging to be clear or too restrictive to be persuasive’ (Canovan 1982: 544). It was, according to the author, best to build a descriptive typology ‘which clarifies the ways in which the term is used while being spacious enough to do justice to the diversity of the movements and ideas concerned’ (Canovan 1982: 550).

Several authors have, more recently, been less reluctant to provide a clear definition, or a universally applicable description, of populism. In his construction of an ideal type, Paul Taggart (2000: 2) identified six key themes: populism is hostile towards representative politics, identifies with an idealised ‘heartland’, lacks core values, is a reaction to a sense of crisis, is self-limiting and episodic, and has a ‘chameleonic’ character. Cas Mudde (2004: 543), in turn, defined populism as ‘an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite”, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people’. Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell (2008b: 3) added a third group (the ‘others’) in their definition of populism as ‘an ideology which pits a virtuous and homogeneous people against a set of elites and dangerous “others” who are together depicted as depriving (or attempting to deprive) the sovereign people of their rights, values, prosperity, identity and voice’.

As is evident from the last two definitions, populism has in recent years often been perceived as an ideology or, more specifically, a ‘thin’ or ‘thin-centred’ ideology (Mudde 2004; Abts and Rummens 2007; Stanley 2008; Rovira Kaltwasser 2014). Following Michael Freeden (1998: 750), a thin-centred ideology is an ideology ‘that arbitrarily severs itself from wider ideational contexts, by the deliberate removal and replacement of concepts’. Along these lines, populism as such lacks a ‘programmatic centre’ and ideas about how to deal with societal issues, but it can ‘cohabit’ with more comprehensive ideologies (Stanley 2008: 100; Rovira Kaltwasser 2014). This is similar to Taggart’s (2000) assertion that populism is chameleonic in adopting the ideological colour which resonates with the values of the ‘heartland’ in which the people reside. This is not to say that there is no substance to the populist ideology; following Stanley (2008: 100), ‘the absence of a common history, programme and social base, whilst attesting to populism’s “thin” nature, does not warrant the conclusion that there is no coherence to the collection of concepts that comprise populist ideology’.

It would appear that treating populism as a (thin) ideology implies that there are political actors with populism as a defining ideological attribute. Indeed, in the European context observers often speak of ‘populist parties’ or party families for which populism is a core component. Mudde (2007), for instance, has treated populism as a core element of the populist radical right, and also identified two other types of populist parties: neo-liberal populists and social populists (see also Zaslove 2008; March 2011). Even though it would not be accurate to speak of a populist ‘party family’ (see Mair and Mudde 1998), for populist parties are not united in the policy positions they take, populism can still be seen as an important core attribute of certain types of parties.

Yet populism is certainly not always treated as a core ideological element of a certain type of movement, party or politician. An alternative approach is to define populism as an (opportunistic) strategy, employed to generate or retain support. Hans-Georg Betz (2002: 198), for instance, asserted that populism could be viewed as a rhetoric ‘designed to tap feelings of ressentiment and exploit them politically’. In his study of populism in Latin America, Kurt Weyland (2001: 14) argued that ‘populism is best defined as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’.

Yet another approach is to perceive populism as a ‘style’. Jagers and Walgrave (2007: 322), for instance, distinguished between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ populism, and argued that the latter form is simply ‘a communication style of political actors that refers to the people’. Populism is, in this sense, not necessarily associated with a certain type of movement or party, but can also be applied by actors such as interest group representatives and journalists. More recently, Moffitt and Tormey (2013) have also argued that it is best to define populism as a style, and to focus on its ‘performative’ and ‘aesthetic’ features. Populism, according to the authors, should be seen in the context of the decline of traditional ideological cleavages and the increased ‘stylisation’ of the political, which goes together with a simplification of political discourse, the formulation of ‘neat us-against-them antagonisms’ and ‘sound-bite solutions’ (Moffitt and Tormey 2013: 387). It may be argued, then,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Studying Populism in European Party Systems
• 2  Populist Parties across Europe
• 3  Paths to Populist Electoral Success and Failure: fsQCA Analysis
• 4  Populist Parties in the Netherlands
• 5  Populist Parties in Poland
• 6  Populist Parties in the United Kingdom
• 7  Conclusion: Populist Parties and Their Electoral Performance
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index