The spatial determinants of the prevalence of anti-elite rhetoric across parties

The article investigates whether there are specific spatial conditions that make a party more likely to pay closer attention to anti-elite rhetoric than to alternative issues in its political confrontation with other parties. The article first treats anti-elitism as a non-policy vote-winning strateg...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:West European politics 2020-11, Vol.43 (7), p.1415-1435
Main Author: Curini, Luigi
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anti-elite rhetoric
Conflict
Elites
Elitism
Europe
expert survey
Ideology
Polarization
Political parties
Rhetoric
valence issues
Voters
Voting
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Summary:The article investigates whether there are specific spatial conditions that make a party more likely to pay closer attention to anti-elite rhetoric than to alternative issues in its political confrontation with other parties. The article first treats anti-elitism as a non-policy vote-winning strategy that could be valued positively by a broad class of voters across ideological lines (its 'quasi-valence' attribute). It is then shown that the incentive of a party to embrace such a strategy grows as the ideological space separating that party from the other(s) shrinks. This hypothesis receives empirical support from the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey Data.
ISSN:0140-2382
1743-9655
DOI:10.1080/01402382.2019.1675122