Cleavages, Protest or Voting for Hope? The Rise of Centrist Populist Parties in the Czech Republic

• Published in: Swiss political science review 2018-06, Vol.24 (2), p.161-186
• Main Authors: Havlík, Vlastimil, Voda, Petr
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Centrism; Cleavage; Competition; Concept formation; Elections; Political parties; Populism; Radicalism; Volatility; Voters; Voting
• ISSN: 1424-7755; 1662-6370
• DOI: 10.1111/spsr.12299

Over the past two decades, populist parties have become a well-established part of many European party systems. Their rise has provoked extensive scholarly discussion aiming both at the conceptualization of and explanations for the reasons behind their electoral success, analyses of their electorate and the impact of populist political parties on the structure of party competition. Nevertheless, these conclusions have been derived from studies focusing either on the populist radical right (Betz 1994; Mudde 2007) or populist radical left parties/social populists (Barker 1998; March 2012), while the relatively new species of centrist populist political parties (Pop Eleches 2010; Ucen 2004) has been neglected in this regard. The article contributes to filling the described gap in the research on populism by analysing the supporters of centrist populist parties (CPPs) in the Czech Republic. Certainly, the Czech Republic is not the only country that has experienced the emergence of CPPs, with Bulgaria (Cholova 2012), Slovakia (Spac 2012) and the Baltic states (Balcere 2012) being other interesting cases. Moreover, Slovenia underwent a party system change of a similar intensity in the early 2010s. Nevertheless, there are serious doubts about the populist character of the newly emerged parties in Slovenia (Krasovec 2012). Consequently, there are at least two reasons that make the Czech Republic a more suitable case for conducting an analysis of CPPs supporters. First, the Czech party system has experienced long-term stability. While the party system in the Czech Republic enjoyed a high level of stability until the emergence of the CPPs, both in terms of volatility and cleavage structure (Casal Bertoa 2014; Powell and Tucker 2014), the rise of centrist populism in Slovakia took place in an environment of continuous change characterized by a transformation of the main political conflicts. Although it was possible to trace some signs of stability in Bulgaria before 2001, the level of both extra-system and intra-system volatility was considerably higher in comparison to the Czech case (Powell and Tucker 2014). The argument about the high er level of volatility applies to the Baltic countries as...