The Potential Populist Voter : A Comparative Study About The Rebellious Voter In Europe

This quantitative paper explores the mean value between selected countries with the ambition to compare the different regions and to understand the conditions in which populist parties grow. The main question that runs through this paper is “How does the potential populist support vary between different regions in Europe?”. This was done by drawing a framework based on the theory of the four D’s of Distrust, Destruction, Deprivation and De-alignment. The selected countries were divided in a similar order from the comparative study of 2015 conducted by Kriesi and Pappas. A survey from 2014 provided the necessary variables in order to measure the mean value of each category and summed up together in order to measure the “pool of potential populist voters”. The paper concludes that the regional and theoretic framework is validated judging upon the mean numbers in each country