Are Anti-Political-Establishment Parties a Peril for European Democracy? A Longitudinal Study from 1950 till 2017

ABSTRACT

That political parties are in a deep crisis is nothing new. The number of works foreseeing the decline of representative democracy is copious. However, studies that empirically examine the relationship between support for anti-political-establishment parties and liberal democracy are almost a rara avis. This article tries to fill a gap in the literature by answering this essential, and notably current, research question. In order to do so, it makes use of an original dataset looking at 28 European countries from 1950 until 2017. Our results show that the relationship between the share of votes for anti-establishment parties and the level of liberal democracy is negative and significant: that is, the higher the strength of these parties, the lower the level of liberal democracy. This study definitively sheds some new light on the perils of populist parties for the survival of liberal democracy.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-political-establishment parties
• populism
• liberal democracy
• electoral fragmentation
• Europe

Notes on Contributors

José Rama Caamaño is PhD Candidate (with a Ministry of Education Grant – FPU) in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM) in Spain. He has been Visiting Research Fellow at Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economical and Political Research (NICEP) – University of Nottingham. He holds a Degree with an Extraordinary Prize in Political Science (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela) and a MA in Democracy and Government (UAM). His main areas of interest include political parties, party systems, electoral systems and economic vote. He has presented his work in several National and International Congresses. [email protected]

Fernando Casal Bértoa is an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham (United Kingdom). He is member of the OSCE/ODIHR ‘Core Group of Political Party Experts’. He is also Co-chair of the Council for European Studies’ Research Network on ‘Political Parties, Party Systems and Elections’ as well as co-director of REPRESENT: Centre for the Study of Parties and Democracy. His work has been published in European Journal of Political Research, Sociological Methods and Research, West European Politics, Party Politics, Democratization, European Constitutional Law Review, Political Studies Review, Government and Opposition, International Political Science Review, South European Society and Politics, East European Politics and Societies or East European Politics. He was awarded the 2017 AECPA Prize for the Best Article. [email protected]

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We have data from the 1950s onwards for Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands and United Kingdom. For the 1970s onwards: Greece, Portugal and Spain. For the 1990s until December 2017: Bulgaria, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Finally, from 2000 onwards: only Croatia

2 In order to deal with the effect of APEp’s support on liberal democracy, and not the opposite (e.g. how the degree of liberal democracy affects APEp’s electoral success), a lag of the latter is employed. We do the same with the rest of the independent and control variables.

3 Schedler (1996, p. 292), the main defender of the use of the concept anti-political-establishment parties, pointed out that scholars usually employ the terms populism, neo-populism, right-wing populism, tele-populism, national-populism, protest parties or anti-party parties in an uncomplicated way, making anti-political-establishment parties a most comprehensive concept.

4 This is very important, especially given the focus of this special issue on populist parties. Thus, our definition of APEp is very close to the ideational approach of populism, characterized by: "1) a Manichean and moral cosmology; 2) the proclamation of the people as a homogenous and virtuous community; and 3) the depiction of ‘the elite’ as a corrupt and self-serving entity" (Hawkins & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2018, p. 3).

5 This is certainly comprehensible, given the fact that, in general, since the end of the Second World War (WWII) APEp had never achieved such electoral success.

6 Centrifugal tendencies arise when the parties to each side of the centre party attempt to lure voters away from the centre party by moving away from it.

7 Still others (Basedau & Stroh, 2011), the few, found no relationship between the two.

8 But this is not the object of this article.

9 As we mentioned above, we do not think APEp are against democracy as a political system, but consider that they are opposed to the rights and liberties of those that they do not consider the ‘pure people’, which are in every way the essence of the liberal dimension of democracy.

10 The electoral principle of democracy is mainly focused on making rulers responsive to citizens, the political and civil society organizations can operate freely, elections are clean (without fraud and irregularities), and elections are able to build the executive of the country. The participatory principle emphasizes active participation by citizens in all political processes. This model of democracy takes suffrage for granted, emphasizing engagement in civil society organizations, direct democracy, and sub-national elected bodies. A deliberative process is one in which public reasoning focused on the common good motivates political decisions—as contrasted with emotional appeals, solidary attachments, parochial interests, or coercion. Egalitarian democracy is achieved when 1) rights and freedoms of individuals are protected equally across all social groups; and 2) resources are distributed equally across all social groups; 3) groups and individuals enjoy equal access to power (see Coppedge et al., 2018, pp. 38–40)

11 Cyprus, Malta and Luxembourg, all of them with fewer than 1 million inhabitants, are not included. For the same reason, Iceland has also been excluded.

12 We acknowledge though that there are other indicators better suited to measure polarization: for instance, Sani’s and Sartori’s (1983) ideological distance or Dalton’s (2008) index.

13 TEV = ½ Σ|v_i,t - v_i,t-1|, where v_i,t is the vote share of party _i at election _t preceded by election _t-1.

14 ENEP = 1/Σv_i^², where v_i is the vote share of party _i.

15 LSq = [0.5(Σ|vi-si|)²]½, where vi and si represent, respectively, the proportion of votes and seats of the ith party.

16 There are no presidential regimes in our dataset.

17 Given the possible endogeneity between our main variables, we opted for lagging all our independent variables. As a robustness check, and in order to disregard the possibility that the direction of causality goes the other way round (i.e. low levels of liberal democracy (IV) produce high levels of support for APEp), we proceeded to regress the latter on the former (at t-1). The results are not statistically significant at the 95 per cent (p value = 0.073; N = 532) being the coefficient ‘-1.074168’. This is in clear contrast to the coefficient of ‘-.0226656’, statistically significant (p value = 0.001; N = 532), which follows from a regression with liberal democracy as DV and APEp support (t-1) as IV (see below).

18 In fact, and even if the growth in APEp’s support has led to important changes in the pattern of inter-party competition in countries like Greece, Finland, Czechia, France, Austria and, more recently, Italy, democracy in these countries is far from having collapsed, at least not yet. And the same can be said of Hungary or Poland, where, though, liberal democracy has been battered in recent years (Nations in Transit, 2018: 7).

19 For the sake of robustness we ran two linear regressions with country dummies separately. The first one includes only Western European countries, whereas the second one includes also Eastern European ones. In both cases we find exactly the same results: namely, the higher the support for APEp, the lower the levels of liberal democracy. See Figure 1A in the Appendix.

20 Which also tells us about the reliability of our analyses.

21 Neither is the variable "age of democracy" significant. In fact, although we might think that the effect of APEp support on the level of liberal democracy should be lower on the more established democracies than on younger ones, the interaction between "APEp support" and "age of democracy" is not statistically significant.

22 The interaction between ENEP and APEp support, even if it has the right (negative) sign, is not statistically significant.

23 Actually, ENEP is statistically significant and with the expected sign in 4 out of 6 of the models, once again confirming – even if only partially – Sartori’s work.

24 For more information about the conceptualization of the other four dimensions of democracy (i.e. electoral, deliberative, participatory and egalitarian) see Coppedge (2018, pp. 38–40).