Lenik, Paulina; (2023) A pendulum swung back? Comparative analysis of populism in Central and Eastern Europe. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The thesis examines the determinants of populist voting, and characteristics of populist parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) from a comparative perspective. After presenting a review of the literature in Chapter 1 and my research design in Chapter 2, the thesis is organised around 3 empirical chapters. In Chapter 3, I incorporate individual level pooled-cross sectional data from the European Social Survey (ESS, 2018) over the years 2002-2018 to examine the electoral behaviour of voters in the CEE relatively to the West, emphasising the ways in which populist voting in CEE differs to that in the West and linking these differences to the region’s Communist past. In Chapter 4, I focus on the populist supply. For populist parties, the study incorporates the Chapel Hill Expert Survey scores on political parties in Europe from 1999 to 2019 (Jolly et al., 2022) and examines these parties’ characteristics. To supplement these, Chapter 5 presents country case studies of Poland and the Czech Republic looking deeper into the demand for populism. The core findings of the thesis are as follows. Firstly, on the demand-side, there is a positive association between the degree of political trust and the populist vote in CEE, which contrasts with the established mistrust argument in the West. Secondly, parties in the West and in the CEE put a similar emphasis on cultural issues such as anti-immigration sentiments or authoritarian openness. However, the thesis identified a greater degree of difference on the economic dimension, indeed, while the centrist-supply (CS) populist parties in both regions were strongly economically leftist, the radical-supply (RS) populist parties in the CEE were placed higher on the economic right than their RS counterparts in the West. Lastly, Chapter 5 presents evidence for further variation on the country-level. While the demand for populism in Poland was characterised by strong pro-welfarist stance, the populist voters in Czechia were unfavourable to parties offering income redistributive policies. Moreover, Czech populist voters were predominantly concerned with the issue of ethnic openness, an aspect insignificant in the case of Poland. These results are an important contribution on what populism stands for, and advance the empirical assessment of this phenomenon.

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