https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9719-001X
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ABSTRACT
This paper examines the responsiveness of populist parties to the salience of issues amongst the public focusing on a large number of issues on which parties campaign during elections. The paper investigates both left- and right-wing populist parties comparatively in three countries, namely Austria, Germany and Italy. We find that while populist parties carry out an important responsiveness function, they are only slightly more responsive than their mainstream counterparts on the issues they own. The results of this paper have important implications for our understanding of political representation and the future of the populist appeal.
Acknowledgement
we would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Annika Werner and Heiko Giebler for useful comments on this paper. The data used in the paper are derived from the ICCP project which is a six-country comparative project promoted by the CISE (Italian Centre for Electoral Studies) at LUISS University Rome, in cooperation with several other partners. More information on the project is available at http://cise.luiss.it/iccp/. This research has been partly supported by funds of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank (Austrian Central Bank, Anniversary Fund, project number: 17449).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Carolina Plescia is Assistant Professor and Hertha Firnberg scholar in the Departmentof Government at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on public opinion, electoral behaviour and political representation. At the University of Vienna, she is one of the principal investigators of the survey component of the H2020 project RECONNECT and she is involved in developing the Austrian National Election Study. She has published in journals such as Political Psychology, West European Politics, Electoral Studies and Party Politics. E-mail: [email protected]
Sylvia Kritzinger is Professor of Social Science Research Methods in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on political behaviour and electoral research, democratic representation and political communication. She is Co-Principal Investigator of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and has published in journals such as British Journal of Political Science, Political Communication and Journal of European Public Policy amongst others.
Lorenzo De Sio is Full Professor at Luiss University Rome. He is the director of the CISE (Centro Italiano Studi Elettorali), a member of the Scientific Council of the ITANES (Italian National Election Studies), and has been Principal Investigator of the six-country Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP). Among his publications there are articles appearing in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Party Politics, West European Politics.
ORCID
Carolina Plescia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9719-001X
Sylvia Kritzinger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2765-8200
Notes
1 The issue yield theory (De Sio & Weber, Citation2014) has further developed this idea, by conceptualising and operationalising the electoral incentives and disincentives associated to different issues for each party.
3 During the latest national election held on March 4, 2018, the new party leader Matteo Salvini has dropped ‘Northern’ from the party name, using simply ‘The League’.
4 In November 2018 List Peter Pilz was renamed into Jetzt (Now). As we focus on the election of 2017 we stick to the party name used during the electoral campaign.
5 The other countries included in the Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP) that is, the UK, the Netherlands and France either do not have populist parties currently represented in the Parliament (UK) or do not have both a right-wing and left-wing populist party competing in elections.
6 While there exists a common agreement on which party can be characterised as populist right party, with regard to populist left parties the classification is less straightforward. Some commentators regard Die Linke and M5S as populist left parties (see comments in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30 July 2015), but others shy away to do so and would characterise Die Linke as a party that is clearly oriented towards the left ideology but not populist, and M5S to embrace both a right-wing and a left-wing ideology. Given recent policy activities of these two parties (for instance, Sahra Wagenknecht of Die Linke who aims to establish a left movement ‘Aufstehen’ whose slogan is to listen to the people, or M5S who introduced a legislation on ‘labour dignity’ in summer 2018), we consider these two parties as proponents of populism on the left (see also Spierings and Zaslove (Citation2017) for the classification of M5S as a populist left party). LPP meanwhile simply characterises itself as a populist left party. The classification we adopt also reflects the left-right ideological orientation of those parties’ supporters being mostly on the left for Die Linke, M5S and LPP (data available upon request).
7 The M5S focused on five key issues (the so-called ‘Five Stars’): public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, Internet access and the environment – issues that overall are connected with a left ideology.
9 Surveys were administered through CAWI to samples (N=1,000) representative of the voting age population by sex-age combinations and geographical units.
10 While survey data measure both respondents’ position and saliency for each issue, only saliency is used to measure responsiveness; issue positioning is exclusively used for exploratory factor analysis.
11 The grouping of issues is not aimed to be analysed for the purpose of identifying issue opportunities for party strategy, but only for assessing which issues are related to common areas of meaning in respondents’ minds. An obvious choice to do this is to investigate the content of the issues, i.e. through issues positions, guided by the theory.
12 Specifically, we excluded five issues in Austria (on surveillance measures, property tax on inheritance, direct democracy, comprehensive school and obligatory membership); five issues in Italy (on tax evasion, economic globalisation, EU economic policies, vaccination and self-defence); and one issue in Germany on binding referenda. While our results are largely consistent to the inclusion of these issues, their cross-cutting nature render their classification in one of the five considered groups problematic.
13 Note that the Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP) only measures party issue saliency not party positioning.
14 The coders have been instructed to code the Tweets into specific issue categories as well as to identify Tweets dealing with non-issue content. Intercoder reliability is Kappa = 0.72 for Austria, Kappa=0.91 for Germany and Kappa= 0.90 for Italy.
15 With respondents reporting ‘medium’ priority being counted as half.
16 Specific country analysis in the three countries investigated – see (Plescia et al. Citationin press) – show that exception made for the FPÖ, populist parties do not appear to use Twitter significantly less than their mainstream counterparts.
17 where v stands for the variance of the residual on the lowest level estimated by the mixed effects tobit model, index 0 indicates the empty model, and index 1 indicates the model of interest.
18 Given that we only have 250 cases for a model with many interactions, we have incrementally simplified Model 5 to test for the robustness of our findings. The results show that the three-way interactions significant in Model 5 keep their significance, and no other significant interactions emerge. The only exception is the interaction ‘populist R × Welfare × saliency’ that is significant at p < 0.1 in Model 5 and would turn significant at p<0.001 in simpler models.