Which Political Parties Do Carry the Seed of Populism? A Systemic Analysis

Populism is a widespread phenomenon that threatens democracies and weakens the rule of law throughout the world (Bugaric and Kuhelj 2018; Galston 2018; Katsambekis 2016; Schulte-Cloos and Leininger 2022). Where is populism more likely to flourish? Which parties tend to engage in populist practices? This study proposes a novel theory to explain why some political parties are more prone to develop populism as a strategy. I state that this occurs under presidential systems. As personalization of the party increases, the degrees of freedom and the incentives for the leader to deviate from that defining the party label enhance. Incentives to deviate from the party label in order to adopt a populist discourse grow as the leader’s internal power enhances. I empirically verify that personalization of the party tends to grow in presidential systems and such greater personalization of the party leads to greater likelihood in the adoption of the populist rhetoric. I test this theoretical contribution by controlling for party level explanations through multivariate models. For this purpose, I take advantage of the availability of the V-Party dataset to measure parties’ use of populism. This study provides important insights to understand the construction of institutionalized and strong party systems, characterized by a stable set of parties that interact regularly in similar ways.