How Issue Salience Explains the Rise of the Populist Right in Western Europe

The marked increase in electoral support for the populist right parties in Western Europe has been one of the most significant political trends of the 21st century. Particularly since 2013, there has been a pronounced increase in the vote share of parties variously labeled as populist radical right, national populist, and populist right in countries such as Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, and the Netherlands—each of which already had established parties matching these labels—and in Germany, Sweden, and the UK—where the populist right’s electoral impact remains a relative novelty. This phenomenon has impacted policy responses of other parties, electoral outcomes, party systems, and government coalitions across Western Europe.

In this article, I test whether variation in issue salience—the extent to which voters consider issues to be “important”—can explain the rise of the populist right. I argue that issue salience is likely to be an important and necessary component of the three most prominent theories used to explain the rise of the populist right: economic competition, cultural backlash, and political demography. By taking a cross-country and cross-time approach at both the aggregate- and individual levels using panel data, I am able to robustly demonstrate that the salience of the issue of immigration has large, positive effects on the electoral support of the populist right at both the aggregate- and individual levels. I also find that this is, in turn, partially caused by immigration rates. I do not find evidence of a positive effect of the issues of crime, unemployment, the economy, or terrorism, which some elements of the literature would predict. I am only able to test the effect of the issue of Europe at the individual level, which I find to be positive and of a similar scale to immigration.

This is an abstract of the article by James Dennison.