A populist or an anti-populist Zeitgeist? Mapping and explaining the asymmetric affective polarization towards the populist radical right parties

After a rapid proliferation in the United States over the last decade, research on affective polarization has finally started to also take off in the rest of the world. System level studies have demonstrated that affective polarization is undoubtedly present in multiparty systems and the intensity of partisan loathing in the US context is not exceptionally high in comparative perspective. In many countries, a significant share of highly negative partisan feelings is associated with populist radical right parties that have a very strong polarizing appeal. However, there is a striking pattern that has hitherto remained in the background in affective polarization studies: the hostility between the populist right and the other parties is clearly asymmetric, i.e. the right-populists receive much more dislike from the supporters of other parties than vice versa. Moreover, this intense loathing towards the right-populists goes beyond what ideological positions would predict. Even the voters of the parties that do not stand so far from the populist right on the left-right scale or do agree with them on cultural dimension issues such as (curbing) immigration, tend to exhibit highly negative feelings toward these parties and their voters. Thus, in the coattail of the rise of right-wing populism across the world, a potentially even stronger anti-populist sentiment has also emerged. While some authors have noticed this pattern, it has remained as a minor observation in most of their work. Therefore, while the phenomenon has been detected in a wide range of countries, we do not know how much it varies cross-nationally and what could be the factors that drive this asymmetry in feelings between the right-populists and the rest of the partisan field. In this paper, we aim at addressing this gap in affective polarization research, focusing on the European countries to ensure better data availability and comparability of cases. Using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we map the levels of asymmetry in affective polarization towards the populist right parties across the European countries over the last 25 years. Having determined how uniform this phenomenon actually is and how much it varies cross-nationally, we then move the analysis to the individual level to find out which variables best predict the feelings towards the right-populist parties and their supporters. Combining data from CSES Wave 5 and our own survey that is going to be launched in France, Italy, Hungary and Estonia between February and June 2022, we test the effects of a range of attitudes regarding populism as a (thin) ideology, populism as a political style, nativism, cultural authoritarianism, illiberal democracy and Covid-19. Letting respondents place parties on different political dimensions, we also scrutinize the possibility that other voters perceive right-populist parties to be more extreme than their own supporters do. This study will contribute to a better understanding of the place that the populist parties occupy in the partisan affective landscape, and help us better grasp which conditions are conducive to higher accommodation (or rejection) of the right-populist parties by other political actors.