Who votes for new parties? Economic voting, political ideology and populist attitudes

Abstract

Beginning with the economic crisis in 2008, a number of European societies witnessed the emergence of ‘new parties’. Most authors explain their electoral appeal by focusing on how the perceived state of the economy influences individuals’ voting decisions. This article determines the extent to which political attitudes can also explain voting for new political parties born in the heat of the economic crisis. Specifically, it explores the link between populist attitudes, in contrast to pluralist and elitist attitudes, and voting for two new political parties in Spain (Ciudadanos; Podemos), which are noticeably different in their ideological positions, programmatic proposals and populist discourses. The results show that stronger populist attitudes increase the likelihood of voting for new parties as dissimilar as Podemos and Ciudadanos. Overall, the findings suggest that voting for new parties cannot be understood as a mere economic response. Rather, political factors, and especially populist attitudes, matter too.

Keywords:

• Populism
• populist attitudes
• new political parties
• economic voting
• economic crisis
• Spain

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the IPSA Conference in Poznan (2016) and the CES Conference in Glasgow (2017). We want to thank the journal’s anonymous reviewers, Team Populism members Margarita Gomez-Reino, Kirk Hawkins and Ivan Llamazares, and the members of the Department of Political Science at the University of St.Gallen for their constructive insights; special thanks go to Sarah Engler, Martina Fuerrutter, Lisa Garbe, Karina Mross, Ciaran O’Flynn and Véronique Wavre. Hugo Marcos-Marne also thanks Blanca Ausin for her help and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Since we study new political parties, which do not necessarily utilise populist discourses, our study differs from those examining the electoral basis of populist parties (Rooduijn 2018; Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018).

2 An exception is Lavezzolo and Ramiro’s (2017) study of support for new parties based on voters’ positions on the left‒right spectrum and stealth democracy. They find that, conditional on their ideology, citizens with stealth-democratic attitudes (i.e. favouring efficiency and experts’ involvement in politics) are less likely to vote for the pro-participatory Podemos and more likely to vote for the centre-right Ciudadanos. Though stealth democrats and populists are united in their anti-elitist views, the two concepts differ with regard to the second dimension of populism, people-centrism (Mohrenberg et al. 2017).

3 The original question in Spanish reads ‘¿Podrías decir a qué partido votarás en las elecciones generales del 20 de diciembre?’.

4 We use the items in the wording suggested by Akkerman et al. (2014) and only replace ‘the Dutch parliament’ with ‘the Spanish parliament’ in POP1. The Spanish version is available in Table OA.2.

5 The two items included in the pluralist factor are highly correlated (> 0.70) and relatively uncorrelated to the other items (Worthington and Whittaker 2006; Yong and Pearce 2013); we therefore see no reason not to use this two-item factor score in subsequent analyses (see Costello and Osborne 2005).

6 Cronbach’s alpha test of reliability behaves slightly better than Akkerman et al.’s (2014) original results, in particular as regards the elitist and the pluralist dimensions.

7 Out of the 789 respondents who declared an intention to vote for a specific political party, 84 individuals declined to answer the personal income question included as control.

8 To compare the populist attitudes of individuals grouped by vote intention, we conducted a one-way ANOVA, which turned out significant at p < 0.01 [F(4, 675) = 39.6, p = 0.00]. Post-hoc comparisons using the Tukey-HSD test indicated that average populist attitudes in voters of PP (M = ‒0.76, SD = 1.08) were significantly lower than in voters of PSOE (M = ‒0.04, SD = 1.06), Podemos (M = 0.48, SD = 0.94), Ciudadanos (M = ‒0.08, SD = 1.09), and Unidad Popular (M = 0.48, SD = 0.81).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hugo Marcos-Marne

Hugo Marcos-Marne is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Chair of Comparative Politics, University of St.Gallen. His research focuses on political behaviour, attitudes and national identities. He has published on these topics in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnicities, National Identities, Revista de Estudios Politicos, Revista Internacional de Sociologia and Revista Española de Ciencia Politica, among others. [[email protected]]

Carolina Plaza-Colodro

Carolina Plaza-Colodro is a PhD candidate at the University of Salamanca. Her research investigates the radical, populist and Eurosceptic reactions of political parties since the beginning of the Great Recession, with special emphasis on parties within the most financially affected countries. Her work has been published in Politics, Revista de Estudios Politicos and Revista Internacional de Sociologia, among others. [[email protected]]

Tina Freyburg

Tina Freyburg is Professor of Comparative Politics, University of St.Gallen. Among her interests are political attitudes, notably democratic and populist attitudes, and their determinants and effects. Her work appears in International Studies Quarterly, European Union Politics and the Journal of European Public Policy, among others. [[email protected]]