The Social Representation of Populism in Europe : A cross-sectional case study of populist supporters across four European states.

The following paper focuses on the relatively new rise of populism which has seen a surge across states across the western world. Populism refers to governance of and for the people, as opposed to the ruling elites. As the sensation of democratic deficits and partisan cleavages increase, the reaction is populism which aims to restore the fundamental democratic values back to the people, advocating a more transparent form of democracy, where power moves away from the ruling elites, back to the people. We explore what populism entails through defining it through its theoretical identifiers and analyzing which political and social attitudes are present in supporters of populist parties. This study is meant to complement Staerkle and Greens study about the social representation of right-populists. By using the same research methodology as Staerkle and Green but also including left populists. This means looking at the social representation of left-right populist supporters and identifying mutual conventions and relations through a cross sectional case study of four countries which have seen a rise in populist parties. The findings lead us to see convergence in left-right populist parties toward institutional distrust and divergence in opinion towards globalism and multiculturalism. In essence, we compare and present the social representation of populist supporters of left-right populist parties and investigate which attributes cause the divergence in their political and social identities