Studies of populism have proliferated in recent years. In particular, they have focused on the motivations of populist voters and on the factors behind the success of populist figures, movements and parties. Three broad explanations for the rise of populism have emerged, albeit with considerable overlap between them.
The first sees the success of far-right parties as an expression of protest by the ‘losers’ from globalization: for example, manufacturing workers in the American Rust Belt or the north of England who lost their jobs as a consequence of the so-called ‘China shock’ (the massive increase in Chinese exports to the West after China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001). However, this interpretation offers little insight per se into why far-right parties rather than far-left parties in Europe so often benefit from anger about the effects of economic competition. In some parts of the continent – in particular, in southern European countries such as Greece and Spain – anger about economic issues has produced a surge in support for far-left parties. In contrast, in Europe’s north and east, far-left parties have had little success.
The second explanation interprets populist protest as expressing a new ‘transnational’ cleavage in European politics. Political scientists have long thought of political contestation as having two dimensions: economic and sociocultural. Recently, many political scientists have seen the second dimension – which pits those in favour of ‘demarcation’, i.e. of protecting national sovereignty against economic, political and cultural globalization, against those in favour of ‘integration’, i.e. of opening economies and delegating power to supranational bodies – as becoming ever more dominant. The main areas of tension here are migration and the closely connected issue of European integration; though in a broader understanding of green-alternative-libertarian (GAL) versus traditional-authoritarian-nationalist (TAN) positions, this cleavage is also visible on issues such as same-sex marriage.
Again, however, this explanation is unable to account for contextual variations in the type of populist protest that often occurs. If populism is an expression of a cultural backlash against cosmopolitanism and post-materialism, for example, it is unclear why it has flourished both in countries such as the Netherlands and Sweden, in which the ‘silent revolution’ towards socially progressive values has gone quite far, and in countries such as Poland and Hungary, in which such a shift has barely started. Nor does this approach clarify why left-wing populism has been successful in some European countries but not in others.
Whereas workers in southern Europe typically vote for left-wing parties (whether old or new), some in northern Europe have abandoned established centre-left parties for the far right.
The third explanation looks beyond competition between cultural and economic causes of populism, arguing that cultural and economic factors are actually connected in complex ways. It stresses that cultural preferences are not independent from economic status. In particular, voters who favour ‘demarcation’ over ‘integration’ usually fear relative economic or cultural deprivation. They typically belong to labour market groups whose ‘work logic’ instils a social and political orientation that is more communitarian than cosmopolitan. But again this cannot account for the wide variations in populism seen in Europe. Whereas workers in southern Europe typically vote for left-wing parties (whether old or new), some in northern Europe have abandoned established centre-left parties for the far right – a ‘work logic’ argument evidently fails to explain these differences.
Aside from the problems specific to each approach, all three tend to generalize from cases of populism in individual countries, or to test single variables across many country cases, usually with limited explanatory success. For example, the argument that populism is an expression of revolt by the losers from hyperglobalization is persuasive in the case of the UK, where scholars have shown a correlation between trade shocks and voting for Brexit and the UK Independence Party. But it is much less convincing in reference to other European cases, such as that of Germany, where the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has been successful in prosperous, growing and globalized southern states such as Saxony, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. The same goes for Italy, where the far-right Lega party is strongest in the economically successful north, not the poorer south. In Sweden, a highly internationalized economy, it is manufacturing workers, not the unemployed or those in marginal employment, who vote for the far-right Sweden Democrats.
More broadly, explanations of populism that focus on economic factors – from unequal economic growth and unemployment to specific differences in exposure to migration, changes in population composition as a result of intra-country migration to large cities, or differential demographic decline – go only so far. For example, Barry Eichengreen’s broad claim that ‘populist revolts rarely arise in good economic times’ is hard to square with the rise of populist parties such as PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary, given the strong economic growth in those countries over the past 20 years. Similarly, the idea of an emerging cleavage between urban and rural areas that is fuelling populist protest as a kind of ‘revenge of the places that don’t matter’ seems to be relevant in some contexts, such as in France and the US, but not in others.
The ‘cultural backlash’ thesis, which emphasizes the impact of value change, is also hard to reconcile with the heterogeneity of populism in Europe. As with the ‘work logic’ explanation, this thesis sheds little light on the rise of left-wing populism. Moreover, the idea of a ‘silent revolution’ in values since the 1960s emphasizes the historical longue durée, but is unable to explain relatively strong shifts in vote shares within relatively short periods, as for instance between the Lega and Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy between 2018 and 2019. It also ignores huge historical differences, in particular between western regions of Europe and central and eastern ones, as cultural liberalization in the latter began only after the end of the Cold War.
What has until recently been almost completely missing from the debate is a comparative political economy of populism: i.e. an analysis of the specific national and regional contexts in which populism has emerged in different parts of Europe. Such an analysis needs to take into account the basic features of labour markets, welfare states and growth models, as these in part determine different countries’ vulnerability to different types of hyperglobalization shock (see next section). In so far as scholars have analysed populism in the context of these features of European societies, they have focused mainly on right-wing populism and/or on the fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008–09 and the subsequent crisis in the eurozone.
