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Cultural Divides and Populist Voting: Evidence from a Global Panel

Author

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  • Michal Brzezinski

    (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences)

Abstract

Cultural heterogeneity—the within-country dispersion of values measured across hundreds of survey items—predicts populist voting across 60 democracies from 1970 to 2019. I compute fractionalization and polarization indices on Integrated Values Survey value items and regress three populism measures on these indices in a dynamic two-way fixed-effects panel with country-level clustering. A one-within-country-standard-deviation increase in cultural polarization is associated with a rise in vote-weighted ideational populism of about 14\ robust to system-GMM and to a sensitivity analysis for selection on unobservables. A V-Party-based GAL–TAN decomposition shows that the mobilization skews toward culturally-authoritarian parties, with no detectable movement in the progressive-libertarian camp. Including behavioral items in the heterogeneity measure eliminates the effect; the values-versus-behaviors boundary is empirically decisive.

Suggested Citation

  • Michal Brzezinski, 2026. "Cultural Divides and Populist Voting: Evidence from a Global Panel," Working Papers 2026-12, Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw.
    • Handle: RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-12
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    File URL: https://www.wne.uw.edu.pl/download_file/040342df-afa0-49ab-a33a-f334845561be/4282
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    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • Z13 - Other Special Topics - - Cultural Economics - - - Economic Sociology; Economic Anthropology; Language; Social and Economic Stratification
    • P16 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Capitalist Economies - - - Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State
    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models

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