Who Votes for Right-wing Populist Parties in Central and Eastern Europe? Comparing the Electorates of Seven Populist Parties

Autor principal:
Piotr Zagorski (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Autores:
José Rama Caamaño (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Andrés Santana Leitner (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Programa:
Sesión 2, Sesión 2
Día: miércoles, 10 de julio de 2019
Hora: 12:30 a 14:30
Lugar: Aula 105

What unites the voter bases of right-wing populist parties (RPP) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? To answer that question, we focus on seven populist parties from five CEE countries. We find that nativism, political distrust, and economic deprivation, all of them key determinants of RPP’s support in several Western European countries, do not differentiate RPP voters from supporters of other parties in most CEE countries. Thus, just as in the West (Rooduijn, 2018), ‘the’ populist voter does not exist in the East. Despite this heterogeneity, and in line with Werts, Scheepers, and Lubbers (2013), this study suggests that opposition to European integration might explain RPP success in that region to a greater degree than the perceived ethnic threat or economic deprivation. We show that Euroscepticism is the most commonly shared driving factor of RPP voting in CEE. This finding calls for a reassessment of the broadly shared idea of the gap existing in CEE between the supply and demand side of politics with regard to European integration.

Palabras clave: Populism, Right-wing parties, Central and Eastern Europe, Voting behaviour, Euroscepticism