Abstract
Recent research in the UK has shown that an authoritarian populist (AP) cluster of attitudes centring on opposition to immigration, cynicism about human rights, disapproval of the EU, support for a robust defence and foreign policy, and a right-wing ideology form a single factor that underpins a range of other political preferences. In this chapter, the authors replicate these analyses for the UK and an additional 11 European countries. The analyses reveal that authoritarian populist attitudes form a single factor in ten of the twelve countries. Across these ten countries, the sources of AP attitudes are very similar, with particularly strong effects for the perceived cultural consequences of immigration. A series of country-by-country cluster analyses of the component measures making up our AP scale identifies the ‘political tribes’ of each country and differentiates between left- and right-wing authoritarian populists and estimates potential support for authoritarian populist parties, demonstrating that potential support for right-wing authoritarian is much larger than indicated by either past vote or current vote intentions.
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Notes
- 1.
The full question wording and country-by-country responses are laid out in Table A1 of the Online Supplementary Materials, available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_4.
- 2.
- 3.
To be clear, we expect this to be the case even after controlling for national levels of immigration.
- 4.
All predictor variable terms are as defined in Table A2 of the Online Supplementary Materials.
- 5.
The distributions of these variables are reported in Annex 1 of the Online Supplementary Materials.
- 6.
Table A3, parts 1 and 2 of the Online Supplementary Materials contain the precise estimates for the coefficients.
- 7.
The impact of education is likely to be mediated by other variables, such as attitudes to immigration. The coefficients in Table A3, parts 1 and 2 of the online materials represent the direct impact of education.
- 8.
See Annex 2 of the Online Supplementary Materials.
- 9.
This is available at http://www.parties-and-elections.eu/countries.html. See Annex 3 of the Online Supplementary Materials which shows how parties are allocated to party families in each country.
- 10.
See Annex 4 of the Online Supplementary Materials for the detailed country-specific distributions.
- 11.
Annex 5 of the Online Supplementary Materials presents a simple ordered logistic model of the Party-Family variable. This shows that the strong bivariate relationship between vote intention and AP tribe persists when multivariate controls are imposed.
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Eight indicators of authoritarian populism: Variable definitions and summary measures (mean scores in parentheses)(DOCX 122 kb)
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Bartle, J., Sanders, D., Twyman, J. (2020). Authoritarian Populist Opinion in Europe. In: Crewe, I., Sanders, D. (eds) Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7_4
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