POP already treated extensively about the links between populism, the far right, and nostalgia. In the last year alone, we had a great talk with Francesca Melhuish, who analyzed British nostalgia and Brexit, as well as Ezgi Elçi, who studied Ottoman nostlagia in Turkey.
In this interview, Luca Versteegen shows that nostalgia predicts support for radical right parties and is associated with more negative evaluations of the government.
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In this interview with Maurits Meijers, we discuss the result of an expert survey that covers 250 political parties across 28 European countries. They do not simply ask if a party is populist, but how populist it is. Moreover, other dimensions of these parties are considered: their ideological position, their use of emotional tones, and much more. The data are available for downloading at Harvard Dataverse and you can play with the interactive tool to have a better grasp of the characteristics that come with populism.
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Anne Schulz investigates the relationship between populist citizens and the media. People with strong populist beliefs reject the media as an enemy because they seem to think that the media conspire together with the political elites. They mainly rely on soft news media and commercial TV. Moreover, populist citizens are strongly projecting their opinion onto public opinion. In other words, they believe that everybody else share their views. Finally: guess which social madia they prefer between Facebook and Twitter?
This, and much more, in a new interview. Enjoy.
A new interview addressing many thorny issues of contemporary democracy. Left-wing populist movements across the globe, malfunctions of representative democracy, the dialectic between people and politicians, horizontal and vertical dimensions of populist mobilisation, the potential democratic renewal inherent in forms of direct democracy, the future of social democracy. This, and much more, in a fluvial chat with Giorgos Katsambekis.
In this interview, professor Daniele Albertazzi explains the success of populist parties in Italy. The 4th of March, two populist parties – Five Star Movement and Lega – obtained their best results ever, and they are likely to form the next government. What is going to happen next? How is it possible that two populist parties collect almost half of the vote share? What can Europe learn from the Italian elections?
Daniele Albertazzi is Senior Lecturer in European Politics and Postgraduate Research Director at the Department of Politics and International Studies of the University of Birmingham (POLSIS). He has published widely on European politics in international journals such as West European Politics, Party Politics and Government & Opposition. Daniele is the co-editor (with Duncan McDonnell) of Twenty-First Century Populism: The Spectre of Western European Democracy (Palgrave, 2007) and the co-author (with Duncan McDonnell) of Populists in Power (Routledge, 2015). He co-convenes the Italian Politics Specialist group of the Political Studies Association with Arianna Giovannini.
Populist actors use an emotional, dramatized and colloquial language, and for this reason their messages are more convincing. Or, at least, that is what many commentators have been arguing for quite some time. In her research, Dominique Wirz* found out that this is actually the case. In this interview she explains that populist messages are very likely to trigger emotions – negative emotions towards the bad people and positive emotions towards the good people. Moreover, since negative emotions are unpleasant, people feel a strong need for immediate solutions and this seems to makes populist appeals especially persuasive.
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