The politics of European countries have experienced dramatic transformations over the last ten years. The joint combination of long-term structural processes (globalization and European integration) and exogenous shocks (the Great Recession and the migration waves from Asia and Africa) have increased public feelings of political alienation and discontent, and led to the severe electoral punishment of mainstream political parties (Kriesi et al
The articles gathered in this special issue use different types of methodological strategies (qualitative, comparative, and quantitative) in order to analyze the nature and implications of these transformations in several European countries. These articles mostly focus on the party systems of three Mediterranean countries (Italy, Spain, and France) that, despite sharing key similarities in their long-term cleavage structures (importance of state-Catholic church conflicts and role of socialist-communist splits- Rokkan
The cases studied here illustrate the ideological and programmatic diversity of populism. This diversity is not accidental and does not reflect any flaw in the theoretical concept of populism. On the contrary, this ideological diversity reveals crucial structural features of populism that have already been underscored by different authors. In order to show this it is necessary to reconsider the core elements of populism as understood from the perspective of the ideational approaches that now prevail in this field of research (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser
The articles gathered in this special issue analyze the diversity (ideological, discursive, and attitudinal) of populism by combining multiple analytical strategies (qualitative and quantitative, case oriented and comparative). In this methodological and empirical richness lies one of the main interests of this issue. The article by de Blasio and Sorice focuses on the relationships between “surrogate representation” and the institutionalization of neo-populist movements and parties. In particular, these authors explore the connections between the rhetoric of e-democracy and the processes of depoliticization in new technopopulist movements. Anselmi and de Nardis analyze the emergence of multipopulisms in Italy in connection with the de-politicization processes experienced by that country. These authors examine the main populist phenomena in Italian politics as variants of a shared structure whose main point of commonality lies in the presence of “civic matrix.” More specifically, the pattern of multipopulism in Italy has been characterized by a succession of populist variants organized around the prevalence of the civil society and the rejection of politics. The pieces by García-Sanz et al and Boscán et al use public opinion data in order to examine the determinants, ideological correlates and party-system effects of populist attitudes in Italy, Spain, and France. Garcia-Sanz et al analyze the persistence of spatial, ideological electoral competition and the role that populist attitudes play in the explanation party ideological locations. Their analysis shows that the inclusion of populist attitudes makes spatial models more realistic and that the effects of populist attitudes on ideal party locations are stronger in the two cases that suffered the most as a result of the Great Recession, that is, in Italy and Spain. Boscán et al show that populist attitudes are a clear component of the Italian, Spanish, and French public opinions, and also that, important differences notwithstanding, at the party system level populist attitudes are positively related with redistributive preferences. Their article shows also that, at the individual level, socio-economic characteristics (education, occupation, and income) exert similar effects on populist attitudes in these three countries. Finally, Plaza-Colodro et al examine, at the supply-side level, the associations between populism and euroscepticism in different European countries. The theoretical and empirical richness of these analyses has been made possible by recent methodological refinements in the study of populism in both the fields of discourse and public opinion (Hawkins and Castanho Silva
Two main, broad inferences can be drawn from these analyses. In the first place, these articles show both the pervasiveness and the crucial political implications of populist discourses and attitudes in Europe after the Great Recession. The presence of populist ideas among political parties is revealed by discourse analyses (both qualitative and quantitative) and expert-based data. And the importance and effects of populist attitudes among the publics is shown by quantitative analyses on the attitudinal maps, voting effects, and party-system implications of populist attitudes. No accurate understanding of the current politics of these three countries can be elaborated without paying special attention to the characteristics and effects of populist discourses and attitudes. In the second place, analyses in these articles reveal the combination of a shared populist ideational core with diverse discursive, ideological, and programmatic elements. A shared “populist moment” is present in the cases analyzed here, and some ideological and socio-economic constants have also been identified by these works. And however, at the same time, populist discursive configurations are characterized by important substantive and ideological differences as a result of the contingent historical and political patterns that distinguish each of these cases. By exploring the invariant and diverging elements that are present in populist actors and ideas, this comparative issue help us improve our understanding of the characteristics and effects of populism in contemporary European politics.