Posted by Free market think tank TIMBRO recently released an update on their index of ‘authoritarian populism’ – this makes an assessment of the support for authoritarian populist parties in national elections across Europe,* as seen in the parliamentary influence, voter share and actual votes cast that such parties garner.
By looking at reasonably comparable results information from 1980 to the present, TIMBRO thus has consolidated a picture of larger Europe to give one a sense of where things are now.
To the authors, this suggests a ‘brand new ideological landscape’ in which the new populists are now an established feature – though there remains a significant gap in sharing a concept of what populism really means.
*The authors note that this is ‘thirty-three countries including the twenty-eight members of EU plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia and Montenegro. Non-democracies are excluded, since there is no real meaning in comparing countries where democratic rights systematically are being limited or violated to consolidated democracies. The same goes for semi-authoritarian countries with regular, but only somewhat, free elections: Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova. Here, the supply of alternatives to authoritarian populism is too scarce for any meaningful comparison’.
Constitutional populism: 