How the Populist Right Is Redrawing the Map of Europe

Editor: Anne SwardsonAnne Swardson

Design & development: Hayley WarrenHayley Warren, Cedric SamCedric Sam, Sam DodgeSam Dodge and Jeremy Scott DiamondJeremy Scott Diamond

With the assistance of: Jennifer Prince, Mathieu Benhamou, Alex McIntyre, Julian BurgessJulian Burgess, Catherine BosleyCatherine Bosley, Nikos ChrysolorasNikos Chrysoloras, Tony CzuczkaTony Czuczka, Andrea DudikAndrea Dudik, John FollainJohn Follain, Helene FouquetHelene Fouquet, Boris GroendahlBoris Groendahl, Elizabeth KonstantinovaElizabeth Konstantinova, Flavia Krause-JacksonFlavia Krause-Jackson, Peter LevringPeter Levring, Niklas MagnussonNiklas Magnusson, Alessandra MigliaccioAlessandra Migliaccio, Wojciech MoskwaWojciech Moskwa, Kati PohjanpaloKati Pohjanpalo, Josh RobinsonJosh Robinson, Zoltán SimonZoltán Simon, Sveinung SleireSveinung Sleire, Marine StraussMarine Strauss, Chad ThomasChad Thomas, Andrea TimuAndrea Timu and Paul TugwellPaul Tugwell

Methodology

To identify European political parties for use in this analysis, Matthijs Rooduijn, an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam specializing in the rise of populist left and right parties, provided Bloomberg a list of 88 parties across 27 countries that he categorized as at least one of the following: populist, far right, far left. The list was rooted in a classification devised by Cas Mudde, now an associate professor at the University of Georgia and widely seen as an authority on European comparative politics, in his 2000 book, The Ideology of the Extreme Right and then updated for his 2007 book, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. The list has since been maintained and updated by Rooduijn and other scholars.

For the list he refined for Bloomberg, Rooduijn based his classification on definitions taken from Mudde’s 2007 book for populism, nativism, and authoritarianism. The latter two, when combined, are characteristic of the radical right specifically. That’s why that term is used throughout rather than “far right,” which encompasses extreme-right parties (such as Golden Dawn in Greece) that are not included in this analysis.

The definitions used:

• Populism is “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonte generale (general will) of the people.”
• Nativism is “an ideology which holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (‘the nation’) and that nonnative elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening to the homogeneous nation-state.”
• Authoritarianism is “the belief in a strictly ordered society, in which infringements of authority are to be punished severely. In this interpretation, authoritarianism includes law and order and “punitive conventional moralism.”

Other academic titles Rooduijn relied on included Populist Parties in Europe, a 2015 book by Stijn van Kessel, a lecturer in European politics at Queen Mary, University of London; Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties In Western Europe, a 2016 book by Rooduijn with collaborators Tjitske Akkerman and Sarah L. de Lange, both also faculty members at the University of Amsterdam; as well as various other scholarly articles categorizing parties.

Rooduijn also consulted several fellow researchers: Paul Taggart, a professor of politics at the University of Sussex, who provided Bloomberg a separate list of euroskeptic parties he compiled with funding from the U.K. Economic and Social Research Council; Andrea Pirro, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, on Eastern European political parties; and Luke March, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, on matters related to the radical left.

Bloomberg then conducted a peer review of Rooduijn’s list, which was augmented and updated where necessary. Besides Van Kessel, Akkerman, Taggart, Pirro, and March, the following also took part: Duncan McDonnell at Griffith University in South East Queensland, Australia; Kevin Deegan-Krause at Wayne State University, U.S.; Sergiu Gherghina at the University of Glasgow; and Paris Aslanidis at Yale University.

The last step: filtering for just those parties that have won at least one seat in their respective national legislature or the European Parliament at some point in their history. That resulted in a final list of 39 parties across 22 countries that served as the foundation for Bloomberg’s cross-continent analysis. Countries that were included in the list but didn’t feature any qualifying parties: Cyprus, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Portugal, and Spain.

Twelve indicators from the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey were selected to show how the parties line up on issues related to the concepts of populism, nativism, and authoritarianism detailed above, as well as related to nationalism, traditional conservative politics, and other issues. The indicators are ordered based on the variance of parties’ ratings.

To gauge the political influence of these parties, Bloomberg then collected detailed results for the previous two parliamentary elections held for 19 of these countries from their respective electoral commission or agency. (Slovenia, Croatia, and Latvia were excluded because of time constraints in the data collection process.) The first-round parliamentary vote was used for France to gauge the baseline support for the National Front, while the party list (or second) vote was used for Germany because that tracks support for Alternative for Germany overall rather than support for a party’s individual local candidates.

In order to present results at a more local level that would render intelligibly in a Europe-wide map and be able to correlate with socioeconomic data, election results were aggregated for each country to the second level of the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS) used by Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency. For Finland and Germany, not all constituencies line up neatly with NUTS regions, so votes were allocated based on municipal-level results.

National-level parliamentary and European Parliament election results going back several decades were sourced from ParlGov, a database of 920 elections maintained by a group of academics from across Europe and currently affiliated with the University of Bremen. (Results for the most recent parliamentary elections in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Norway were not up to date, so were taken from the relevant national election authorities.) Based on this data, several historical analyses and graphics were created, focusing on the above-mentioned list of parties currently classified as populist and radical right, even if such labels would not have applied in the past.

Note: Two parties that provoked some disagreement among the various scholars consulted were Fidesz in Hungary and Law and Justice in Poland, which some said shouldn’t be classified as radical or far right. Rooduijn’s response: “Regarding PiS and Fidesz: you can see that these are indeed borderline cases (because scholars still disagree). I tend to argue that they are, by now, radical right. Both attack liberal democracy. [Fidesz leader Viktor] Orban wants an ‘illiberal democracy,’ and [Law and Justice leader Jarosław] Kaczynski is a fan of Orban. Moreover, both the Polish and Hungarian governments want to close the borders, because they want to keep refugees out of the country. Kaczynski even argued that immigrants bring diseases and parasites to Poland.”