Explaining vote for populist parties: the impact of the political trust, the economic and the political context Danilo Serani Department of Political and Social Sciences Universitat Pompeu Fabra
[email protected] Abstract Over the last decades, the uneven electoral success of populist parties in Europe sparked the interest of many scholars. Until now, special attention has been devoted only to radical (especially right-wing) populist parties, at the same time as the impact of political trust on the vote for these parties has not been sufficiently addressed. In this paper, I focus on the direct and conditional effects of the trust in the main political actors on the vote for radical and non-radical populist parties. By using data from the European Social Survey (2004- 2014), this paper investigates the association between political trust and the Great Recession, as well as with the ideological convergence of the establishment parties. The results seem to confirm that political (dis)trust has a direct impact on the vote for a populist party, and its effects are accentuated during a crisis and when the establishment parties converge to the center. Key words Political trust, voting behavior, populism, multilevel analysis, economic crisis Paper prepared for the WAPOR Conference, Barcelona, November 24-25th 2016 This is a draft, please do not quote or circulate without author’s permission Introduction Over the last three decades, Europe witnessed the spread of the third wave of populism (Mudde, 2007). Far from being a transitory anomaly of liberal democracies, populist challengers of the establishment parties managed themselves to consolidate their position in the party systems.