Abstract
Much cross-sectional scholarly work has been done on the causes of radical-right wing populist movements in western Europe, but much less has been done on both left-wing populist parties and Europe’s peripheral states. This paper engages both shortcomings through a two-stage quantitative and qualitative approach and finds that unemployment is a most likely cause of left-wing electoral success for all European democracies regardless of geographical location. Moreover, the assumption that immigrants breed right-wing success is challenged. This paper instead finds their achievements to be contingent on the political strategies employed by the center. For ethno-territorial and xenophobic parties to succeed, there first must be adversarial engagement of their issue from the established middle, otherwise, their issue is not made salient in the public’s eyes.
How to Cite
Blanchette, W., (2019) “Populism and Its Two Faces: Understanding Electoral Advances by Left and Right-Wing Populist Parties in Contemporary Europe”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 32(1), 5/1/2019.
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