Varieties of Populist Parties and Party Systems in Europe: From State-of-the-Art to the Application of a Novel Classification Scheme to 66 Parties in 33 Countries

Abstract

Despite the explosion of populism research, there is a shortage of comprehensive analyses of the ideational varieties of populist parties and of the different roles they play in contemporary party systems. In order to overcome such limitations, I provide a state-of-the-art review of the literature on the classification of populist parties and make three innovative contributions to populism research. First, by adopting a truly pan-European perspective to cover, in addition to EU member countries, contexts that are generally overlooked, including but not limited to Liechtenstein, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine, this review article provides an empirical application of the ideational approach to populism to 66 contemporary parties. Second, it highlights the major shortcomings of common approaches to the study of populist parties in contemporary party systems, which almost invariably treat them as 'challengers' or 'outsiders'. Finally, it pushes the agenda further by providing a classification and empirical overview of the three interactive patterns characterizing the 66 populist parties under analysis: non-integration, negative integration and positive integration.

Hurricane or fresh breeze? Disentangling the populist effect on the quality of democracy

“…This could include variance from world regions outside of Europe and the Americas and over more extensive time periods than those which we have been able to include in our analysis. It might additionally involve a further disaggregation by ideology, such as the heterogeneous category of right-wing populists (Zulianello, 2020). For now, we conclude that populist actors exert diverging impact on different layers of democratic quality, which are partly mediated by their specific construction of the 'people' they purport to speak for.…”

Understanding public concern about climate change in Europe, 2008–2017: the influence of economic factors and right-wing populism

“…The central focus of right-wing populism is on culture and nativism aiming to protect the 'native people' from 'dangerous others'. Left-wing populism, on the other hand, lacks this element and portrays the struggle between the elite and the people mainly as a class struggle where the former economically exploits the latter (Huber, 2020;Huber & Schimpf, 2017;Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2013;Zulianello, 2020). Some of the core tenets of right-wing populism, in particular its tendency towards authoritarianism, relate negatively to liberal democratic quality (Mudde, 2007), which is why the rise of right-wing populism is often depicted as an unfolding crisis of liberal democracy (Forchtner, 2019).…”

The Baskerville's dog suddenly started barking: voting for VOX in the 2019 Spanish general elections

“…We identify VOX as populist whilst acknowledging a lack of consensus in the literature regarding the categorization of Vox. Turnbull-Dugarte (2019a) and Mudde (2019) argue that populism forms a core element of Vox's political offering; see also Zulianello (2020), but this is challenged by Ferreira (2019). Relying on a detailed discourse analysis of VOX's electoral programme, Ferreira argues that, although populist rhetoric is present, it is not a central aspect.…”