Left-Right radicalism and Populist attitudes in France and Spain

ABSTRACT

There is little doubt that supply-side populism associates with radical platforms of the left and the right. However, few empirical analyses have focused on the connection between left-right ideological radicalism and populism at the individual level, even less in countries where populist discourses are not only associated with the radical right. This paper considers the association between populist attitudes and ideological radicalism in two countries where left-wing populist parties exist: France and Spain. For that, it uses an approach to political ideology that distinguishes political-economic issues and political-cultural ones. Main results show that radically minded individuals, located at the left and the right of the ideological axis, display stronger populist attitudes in France and Spain. However, differences between the two countries exist that highlight the relevance of context-dependent associations between populism and other (thick) ideologies in the electoral arena. In France, individuals located at the extreme right of the cultural dimension tend to show stronger populist attitudes than those located at the far left. In contrast, in Spain, individuals located at the extreme left of the economic and cultural dimensions display stronger populist attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• left-right ideology
• ideational approach
• France
• Spain

Acknowledgements

The authors are indebted to the team of Comparative Politics of the University of St.Gallen and the group of European Politics at ETHZ for their valuable comments. Special thanks go to Marie-​Eve Bélanger, Tina Freyburg, Ciaran O’Flynn, Frank Schimmelfennig, and Dominik Schraff.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Bibliographical references

Hugo Marcos-Marne is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the University of Salamanca, where he is also member of the Democracy Research Unit (DRU). [email protected]

Ivan Llamazares is a Professor of Political Science in the University of Salamanca. [email protected]

Susumu Shikano is a Professor of Political Methodology in the University of Konstanz. [email protected]

Notes

1. The latter interpretation has put more emphasis on the situational, flexible, nuanced, and strategic character of populist discourses (Aslanidis 2015, 12–13).

2. For example, one individual might support a revolution that radically transforms the economy of a country, but if their idea of revolution empowers a new political elite that rules without the people, this would hardly fit the populist minimal criteria. Conversely, previous studies have shown that strong populist attitudes are found also among individuals that locate themselves in the center of the ideological scale (Andreadis et al. 2018).

3. Detailed information on the selection process, which is in compliance with ISO 26,362 standards of quality, is available at: https://www.netquest.com/en/online-surveys-investigation. The limitations associated with quota sampling, especially in online environments, are not expected to have important implications for our research. This is so because we are more interested in associations between variables than in inferring population values form our sample. More information about the survey is available upon request from the authors.

4. POP1: ‘The politicians in the Spanish parliament need to follow the will of the people’. POP2: ‘The people, and not politicians, should make our most important policy decisions’. POP3: ‘The political differences between the elite and the people are larger than the differences among the people’. POP4: ‘I would rather be represented by a citizen than by a specialized politician’. POP5: ‘Elected officials talk too much and take too little action’. POP6: ‘What people call “compromise” in politics is really just selling out on one’s principles’.

5. The questions read: In a scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 means totally in favor of the statement, and 10 means totally against it, where would you position yourself with regards: a. the intervention of the state in the economy; b. redistribution of wealth from rich citizens to poor citizens; c. rising taxes to improve public services.

6. The questions read: in a scale ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 means totally in favor of the statement, and 10 means totally against it, where would you position yourself with regards marriage between people of the same sex; privacy rights, even if they complicate fight against crime; a public policy designed to limit immigration; priority of environmental issues even at the expense of economic growing.

7. Utilizing average values can be problematic to measure multidimensional attitudes when these dimensions cannot be compensated among them, as it happens with populist attitudes. However, empirical analyses indicate, first, that this issue is less relevant for the scale developed by Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove (2013) and, second, that alternative measures to averaging correlate highly with our scale both in France and Spain (Wuttke, Schimpf, and Schoen 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion de España under Grant [CSO2013-47667-P], the Research Committee at the University of St.Gallen under Grant [IPF- 1031522], and the Consejería de Ciencia, Universidades e Innovación of Comunidad de Madrid [2019-T2/SOC-16513];Comunidad de Madrid [[2019-T2/SOC-16513]];University of St. Gallen [IPF-1031522];Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades of Spain [CSO2013-47667-P];Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades of Spain under Grant [CSO2013-47667-P];