Do Populist Parties Increase Voter Turnout? Evidence From Over 40 Years of Electoral History in 31 European Democracies
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720923257 |
| Published date | 01 August 2021 |
| Date | 01 August 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720923257
Political Studies
2021, Vol. 69(3) 665 –685
© The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321720923257
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Do Populist Parties Increase
Voter Turnout? Evidence
From Over 40 Years of
Electoral History in 31
European Democracies
Arndt Leininger1 and Maurits J Meijers2
Abstract
While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that
populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation
of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests.
The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party
system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party
competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties,
both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary
elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find
that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election
in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the
relationship between populism, political participation and democracy.
Keywords
voter turnout, representation, time-series cross-sectional analysis, political participation, populist
parties
Accepted: 22 March 2020
Introduction
Since the late 1990s onward, the number of politically relevant populist political parties
in Europe has increased considerably. With varying degrees of success, populist (radical)
right and populist (radical) left parties have established themselves as important players
in European democracies (March, 2011; March and Keith, 2016; Mudde, 2007; Van
Kessel, 2015).
1Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
2Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Maurits J Meijers, Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, P.O. Box 9108, 6500 HK
Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Email: m.meijers@fm.ru.nl
923257PSX0010.1177/0032321720923257Political StudiesLeininger and Meijers
research-article2020
Article
666 Political Studies 69(3)
As populist parties have gained electoral success and, in some cases, have been able to
form government coalitions, political scientists have turned to the question what the
ascendancy of populism means for the quality of liberal democracy. More often than not,
populist parties are considered to be a threat to the stability of liberal democracies. Given
that populists regard ‘the people’ as a pure and homogeneous entity sharing one ‘general
will’ (Mudde, 2004) that needs to be translated into policy, populism is considered to be
antithetical to democratic pluralism and the rule of law. Therefore, authors such as Müller
(2016: 3) conclude that ‘populism tends to pose a danger to democracy’ – see also Abts
and Rummens (2007). And, indeed, Huber and Schimpf (2017), Houle and Kenny (2018),
Ruth (2018) and Kenny (2019) find that populist leaders and parties can have a negative
impact on the separation of powers, the rule of law and minority rights.
Notwithstanding such widespread fears about populist politics, Mudde and Rovira
Kaltwasser (2017) stress potential positive effects of populism. They argue that populist
parties can also be a ‘corrective for democracy’. According to Mudde and Rovira
Kaltwasser (2017: 83), ‘populism tends to favor political participation’. Populist move-
ments and parties are postulated to voice the concerns of citizens who have been previ-
ously mis- or underrepresented by the political establishment. Populist parties are thus
considered to be capable of mobilizing previously underrepresented citizens. Mudde and
Rovira Kaltwasser (2017) hypothesize therefore that populist parties can increase voter
turnout in national elections. The existing evidence, however, on the effects of populist
parties on turnout is inconclusive (Houle and Kenny, 2018; Huber and Ruth, 2017;
Spittler, 2018).
At the same time, the literature on voter turnout often focused on institutional and
party system-related determinants (Blais, 2006; Cancela and Geys, 2016; Geys, 2006;
Stockemer, 2017). Regarding political parties, the turnout literature has primarily focused
on variables such as the (effective) number of parties and the competitiveness of elec-
tions, thereby neglecting more dynamic party competition determinants of voter turnout
(see Blais, 2006; Stockemer, 2017).
As the limited extant research on the relationship between populist parties and political
participation has come to divergent conclusions (Houle and Kenny, 2018; Huber and
Ruth, 2017; Spittler, 2018), our study assesses the effect of populist parties on voter turn-
out for a variety of operationalizations and model specifications. Specifically, we ask the
question: Do populist parties increase turnout in parliamentary elections?
Given that individual-level voter turnout data suffer from problems related to social
desirability and recall bias (Holbrook and Krosnick, 2010; Karp and Brockington, 2005;
Smets and Van Ham, 2013), this study focuses on the aggregate-level turnout in national
elections, with an election in a given country as our unit of analysis. Studying aggregated
voting behaviour is important because ‘individual idiosyncrasies cancel each other and
allow the estimation of models with greater explanatory power’ (Matsusaka and Palda,
1999: 442).
To examine whether populist parties affect aggregate-level turnout, we have compiled
a dataset of 329 national parliamentary elections in European democracies since 1970
from the ParlGov database (Döring and Manow, 2016), the Comparative Political Data
Set (CPDS) (Armingeon et al., 2016) and further sources.
Populist parties may also affect newer democracies differently than established democ-
racies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017) – particularly given that political participa-
tion is less stable in transitional democracies (Kostadinova and Power, 2007; Kostelka,
2017). In our analysis, we therefore also distinguish between Western European (WE)
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