Economic crisis and the variety of populist response: evidence from Greece, Portugal and Spain

Abstract

Greece, Portugal and Spain are among the countries worst hit by the 2008 Great Recession, followed by significant electoral and political turmoil. However, one of the dimensions in which they differ is the presence and varieties of populism in parties’ political proposals. Drawing on holistic coding of party manifestos, we assess the varying presence of populist rhetoric in mainstream and challenger parties before and after the 2008 economic downturn. Our empirical findings show that populism is much higher in Greece compared to Spain and Portugal. We do not find a significant impact of the crisis as the degree of populism remains rather stable in Greece and Portugal, while it increases in Spain, mainly due to the rise of new populist forces. The study confirms that populist rhetoric is a strategy adopted mainly by challenger and ideologically radical parties. In addition, inclusionary populism is the predominant flavour of populist parties in new Southern Europe, although exclusionary populism is present to a lesser extent in the Greek case. We contend that the interaction between the national context – namely the ideological legacy of parties and the main dimensions of competition – and the strategic options of party leadership is crucial for explaining cross-country variation in the intensity of populism and the specific issues that characterise populist discourse.

Keywords:

• Populism
• economic crisis
• Southern Europe
• holistic grading
• inclusionary populism
• party manifesto

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the valuable research assistance provided for Greece (Andreas Siafakas and Miltiadis Rizakis), Portugal (Vera Ramalhete) and Spain (Juan Daniel Elorza and Carolina Plaza). Iván Llamazares' research was made possible by the financial support lent by the Spanish Ministry for the Economy and Competitiveness (Research Grant CSO2013-47667-P). The authors would like to thank also the editors of the special issue and the reviewers for their useful comments.

Notes on contributors

Marco Lisi is an Assistant Professor at Nova University of Lisbon and a researcher at IPRI-Nova. His research interests focus on political parties, electoral behaviour, democratic theory and political representation. He recently edited Party System Change, the European Crisis and the State of Democracy (Routledge, 2019). [[email protected]]

Iván Llamazares is Professor of Political Science at the Universidad de Salamanca. His research has focused on the comparative study of political attitudes and party‒voter links in Europe and Latin America. He has published his research in the journals Ethnicities, Revista Internacional de Sociología, West European Politics, Acta Politica and Social Forces. [[email protected]]

Myrto Tsakatika is senior lecturer in Politics, University of Glasgow. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of European Integration, Europe‒Asia Studies and South European Society and Politics. She is currently involved in the collaborative research project ‘Party Government in Europe Database’, co-ordinated by the University of Umeå and funded by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. [[email protected]]

Notes

1 This paper deals mainly with populism on the supply-side level, i.e. looking at populist discourse of the party as a whole. We are aware that this phenomenon can be examined from other ‘angles’ – e.g. looking at leaders’ discourse or citizens’ attitudes.

2 Both dimensions are included in Kriesi and Pappas’ (2015) work. According to their indicators, Italy seems to diverge from new Southern European democracies as it did not experience a deep economic crisis (only a political one).

3 Salgado and Stavrakakis (2018) have examined populist political communication in Southern Europe, mainly from a media research perspective. Gómez-Reino and Plaza-Colodro (2018) have also addressed the evolution of populism in Portugal and Spain. Their work reveals the leftist character of Iberian populism, but their analysis focuses on the presence of Eurosceptic appeals among populist parties. The focus and scope of their analysis are therefore different from those of this article.

4 The concept of ‘challenger party’ refers to those actors that have never participated in government coalitions (see Hobolt and Tilley 2016; van der Wardt et al. 2014).

5 Unfortunately, we could not rely on speeches because this material is not available for the three countries and for the period before and after the crisis.

6 Polk et al. (2017) report a +0.51 correlation between the CHES anti-elitism indicator and Rooduijn and Pauwels’s scores for the parties in the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

7 We know that in the January 2015 elections populist attitudes had a positive impact on voting for SYRIZA, ANEL and the KKE (Andreadis et al. 2018), but we lack comparable empirical evidence for previous elections and cannot ascertain whether the diffusion or the electoral effects of populist attitudes changed across time.

8 One of the few references to the people in BE’s manifestos can be found in 2011 electoral programme, when it uses the term ‘people’ to identify the victim of the bailout negotiation (BE 2011: 29).

9 According to Dalton’s index, Portugal displayed higher levels of polarisation than Greece and Spain during the crisis period (data available through the ParlGov website: http://www.parlgov.org/).