BRE_F_05 Party Competition and Populism in European Democracies

Objectives / Research Questions

The project examines the consequences that the emergence of populist protests has had on the party systems of Western democracies. The key question of the project is to what extent democracy, through party competition, absorbs and represents social protest, is responsive to it, and thus possibly channels it and transfers it into institutional procedures? The analysis reconstructs the development of party systems in Western democracies over the last 40 years in several respects: the development of their mean, weighed according to the strength of the parties’ votes, according to a left-right scale, both socioeconomic and sociocultural; their polarization, i.e. the distribution of parties on these two scales; and their dimensionality, i.e. the relative importance of either the socioeconomic or the sociocultural dimension of party competition. These changes are then related to determinants of populism.

The project starts from the hypothesis that a populist protest can essentially be understood as a protest against globalization. This has two manifestations: as trade and migration – whereby the protest against “trade shocks” is articulated in left-wing populist terms and the protest against “migration shocks” in right-wing populist terms. This hypothesis has a number of empirical implications, the verification of which is one of the aims of the project. Responsiveness would mean, for example, that the party system moves in the direction of either left- or right-wing protest, partly through the entry of new parties and partly through programmatic adjustments by the other parties. The dominant adjustment mechanism should in turn vary according to the electoral system: in proportional representation systems more by the entry of new parties or in majority voting systems more by changes in the position of existing parties. A comparison of parliamentary and European elections within countries with majority voting systems (such as the UK and France) would make it possible to identify this influence of the electoral system, since European elections (since 2000) are generally conducted according to proportional representation. Increased polarization would be the consequence, among other things, if changes take place due to the entry of new parties and if there is no adjustment of the position of other parties – or there might even be counter-reactions; an increase in the importance of the sociocultural dimension for party competition could be expected above all if populism is mainly protest against migration.

Thematic reference to social cohesion

Modern Western societies are based on the principle of democratic self-government. Their legitimacy is based essentially on the fact that citizens recognize collective decisions as legitimate because they can participate in them through the democratic process. This requires, however, that the political system be responsive to the articulation of dissatisfaction and protest – responsive at least to the extent that these protest positions are “reflected” in party politics (although they do not necessarily translate into politics). The growing concern about social cohesion has therefore recently been expressed above all as concern about the crisis and threat to liberal democracy, which has increasingly been claimed to have lost its responsiveness function. The rise of populist parties was interpreted by many as at least an indication of a current representation and responsiveness deficit. In this project, the party systems of the West are examined to see how populist protest is reflected in them. Do populist parties form and succeed in entering parliament, or do they even become part of the government? Or are there “anticipatory”, preventive adaptation actions by established parties that are able to “keep populist parties small”? Are there shifts in position, or is polarization the result of the rise of populist protests – in other words, are the established parties positioning themselves against populist newcomers, or are they partially adopting their programmes? In which dimensions do we see positional shifts (if we see any), rather on the socioeconomic or the sociocultural dimension, or both? How does this relate to the respective  globalization-induced problems and to the respective institutional characteristics of the countries, especially their electoral systems? Do some electoral or party systems prove to be more resilient to the populist challenge than others?

However, while there is already a general research literature on these questions, which focuses less on populism and more on the consequences of globalization for party competition in general (and notes a decreasing political responsiveness of parties to voters’ preferences), the novelty of the project is its systematic connection to a political-economic theory of populism, which allows for the formulation of country-specific hypotheses and the examination of the entire protest spectrum from left to right. In particular, the literature has so far failed to take immigration into account as a significant manifestation of globalization and as a virulent topic of social conflict. For this reason, the research findings to date must also be regarded as incomplete at best.