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Candidates the world over have managed to get into power by harnessing momentum from voters’ resentment and disillusionment against mainstream politics and elites. Parallels with populism and the resurgence of the concept in political analysis are not mere coincidence. Candidates have appealed directly to voters using new social media, disparaging political parties, invoking a rhetoric of “us against them”—the poor and vulnerable against the elites, especially the progres urban elites—and positioning themselves as outsiders, distant from the traditional political machinery. On the right, the discourse is nationalistic: decrying immigration as a serious threat to national security and the economy, or based on a cultural backlash against progressive value change. On the left, an expropriating, racist, and predatory political elite is the enemy of the people, exploiting the poor and deepening inequality. This phenomenon has manifested itself in contemporary Latin America, a historically populist hotbed, but also in Europe and elsewhere, including the United States.
A particularity of recent developments is the shift from left- to right-wing populism. We have also seen a conservative turn in many other countries, albeit not necessarily of a populist nature: Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru. Therefore, it has become increasingly important to investigate this right-wing shift—populist or not—around the world. Two questions worth asking are, what are the ideological underpinnings of the right-wing vote? And is it a consequence of resentment against some common enemy, or is it based on issue positions?
For instance, some have linked the 2016 victory of President Donald Trump in the United States to a generalized feeling of resentment against progressive elites, based on traditionalist cultural values (Manza and Crowley 2017; Mutz 2018; Morgan 2018; Cramer 2016). In Europe, the right-wing extremist vote is based on the support of those marginalized by globalization and is, to a great extent, a reaction to immigration (Gidron and Mijs 2019). The debate about the affective roots of polarization—based on feelings and group identity, not on issue positions (Iyengar et al. 2012, 2019; Mason 2018)—also points in this direction.
On the other hand, Inglehart and Norris (2016, 2017) argue that the rise of right-wing extremism in Europe is based on a cultural backlash toward progressive value change in recent decades. Thus, values and issue positions, and not...