IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvco/2020026.html

Populism and social polarization in European democracies

Author

Listed:
  • GINSBURGH Victor,

    (ECARES, Université libre de Bruxelles)

  • PERELMAN Sergio,

    (Université de Liège)

  • PESTIEAU Pierre,

    (Université de Liège)

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to explain populist attitudes that are prevailing in a number of European democraties. Populist attitudes expectedly lead to social protests and populist votes. We capture the populist wave by relying not on voting behavior but rather on values that are traditionally viewed as populist values, such as distrust of institutions and neighbors, rejection of migrations and strong preferences for law and order. Our study covers the period 2004 to 2018 and 25 European countries for which we match aggregated indicators of populist values and social polarization computed from ESS and SILC survey micro-data, respectively. We find that social polarization, along with other factors, can explain populist attitudes. We also observe that both populist attitudes and polarization vary across countries much more than over time, with the exception of authoritarian values which appear positively correlated with social polarization, particularly among baby-boomers and younger cohorts.

Suggested Citation

  • GINSBURGH Victor, & PERELMAN Sergio, & PESTIEAU Pierre,, 2020. "Populism and social polarization in European democracies," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2020026, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2020026
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2020.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Amavilah, Voxi Heinrich, 2020. "T’was slouching towards an illusion and now it’s scurrying toward a delusion: A COVID19-shocked doughnut model economy," MPRA Paper 103263, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. Gubello, Michele, 2024. "Social trust and the support for universal basic income," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 81(C).
    3. Andreas, Marike & Kaiser, Anna K. & Dhami, Raenhha & Brugger, Vincent & Sniehotta, Falko F., 2025. "How beliefs and policy characteristics shape the public acceptability of nutritional policies—A survey study in Germany," Health Policy, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • D63 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Equity, Justice, Inequality, and Other Normative Criteria and Measurement
    • I30 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2020026. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.