Populist parties and the two‐dimensional policy space

Abstract

How are parties' ideological positions and levels of populism connected? Existing research either advocates for a U‐shaped relationship between parties' left‐right position and their degree of populism or uses specific dimensions of a two‐dimensional policy space to describe right‐wing populist parties. We provide an integrated perspective to describe parties' degree of populism by arguing that populism is higher when parties put strong emphasis on a collectivist host ideology. This has implications on how these ideologies relate to the two‐dimensional policy space. Combined with salience of policy dimensions, such a perspective allows for a better understanding of the occurrence of populism among right‐ and left‐wing populist parties. Using expert survey data on parties in Europe, we find strong and robust empirical support for the expected patterns.

When Correlation Is Not Enough: Validating Populism Scores from Supervised Machine-Learning Models

“…This is in contrast to the conception of populism as a thin-centered ideology that is conceptually independent from thick ideologies. Moreover, studies connecting populism to left–right positions highlight that it is radicalism that is predictive for populism (Rooduijn and Akkerman 2017; Huber, Jankowski, and Juen 2022). The features in Germany—“public”, “social”, and “employed”—are not indicating radical language, but rather mainstream left-wing content.…”