Does Performance Matter? The Influence of Attitudes Towards Welfare State Performance on Voting for Rightwing and Leftwing Populist Parties

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Authors

SAXONBERG Steven SIROVÁTKA Tomáš GUZI Martin

Year of publication 2024
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source SOCIAL POLICY AND SOCIETY
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Social Studies

Citation
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Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1474746424000010
Keywords Welfare state performance; populism; left-wing populism; right-wing populism; welfare attitudes
Attached files
Description In recent decades, populist parties and leaders have obtained great political success. Since populism plays on voter dissatisfaction with the political elite, we might expect that dissatisfaction with the welfare state should also play a role. In this study, we suggest measures to assess welfare state performance (WSP), and we examine how assessment of WSP helps to explain support for the populist political parties – both rightwing and leftwing. Our findings are based on the sixth round of European Social Survey data that has a special module on democracy, which includes questions that enables us to measure WSP. This article shows that WSP is a significant predictor in explaining support for populist parties, but the dynamics differ between how WSP influences support for leftwing populist (LWP) and rightwing populist (RWP) parties.
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