Does populist voting rise where representative democracy is systemically failing?

Abstract

Recent scholarship views populist voting as a reaction to systemic failures in political representation. This argument is however controversial due to a lack of empirical evidence. Does this explanation of populist support simply mirror the strategic campaign messaging of populist parties, and should thus be discounted? This study leverages state-of-the-art measures of systemic and non-systemic (i.e. individual-level) representation failures, adopting the constructs of sociotropic and egocentric incongruence. It uses data from the CSES, IPU, the POPPA dataset and the World Bank, covering 64 elections from 2001 and 2018 in 24 Western and Eastern European countries. The study finds that populism owes its success primarily to individual-level representation gaps, and not systemic ones. However, system-level failures in representation do matter in the margins, and for specific subsets of citizens. Furthermore, failures in pluralist representation have more bearing on populist support than majoritarian representation failures.