Populism and the scales of statehood in Western Europe

The rise of populism in Western Europe is often explained as a mobilisation of the opposition against globalisation and supra-national integration. But the domestic-international divide is only one aspect of the more general question about the scalar organisation of government. In this paper, we explore the relationship between populist attitudes and orientations towards state scales more generally. Drawing on a representative survey of 4033 citizens in Britain, France, Germany and Switzerland, we show that populism entails preferences for those state territories viewed as ‘closer to the people’ not only in a metaphorical, but also in a scalar sense. This finding suggests that the rise of populism should not only be explained as a response to a crisis of party government in a context of globalisation. It is also a response to a crisis of national statehood resulting from restructuring processes in which the nation state has lost its role as a unifying energizer.