My article "The spatial determinants of the prevalence of antielite rhetoric across parties" on print @WEPsocial. Under which conditions a party should decide to invest strategically in #populist rhetoric? It's the ideology stupid! Why that? Mini thread
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
The intuition is straightforward: when parties are close to one another, praising one’s own policy position or criticizing that of the other party is tantamount to praising the other’s position and criticizing one’s own because the two positions are so similar.
Moreover, ideological convergence reduces voters’ ability to distinguish among parties. Thus, a higher degree of ideological party similarity incentivizes parties to find a non-policy way to differentiate themselves in the eyes of the electorate.
Embracing anti-elitism can provide a party with that opportunity. The fact that anti-elitism can be valued positively by a broad class of voters across ideological lines (its ‘quasi-valence’ attribute) makes embracing it particularly appealing from an electoral point of view.
In contrast, when parties are spatially distant from one another, the opportunity (and the incentives) to invest first and foremost in anti-elitism should decrease when compared to other (policy) issues.
Formally: I first employ a spatial-model to show that the incentive of a party to embrace anti-elitism grows as the ideological space separating that party from the other(s) shrinks. This hypothesis then receives empirical support from the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey. The end
