The cultural roots of political extremism: An empirical analysis of Populism in Europe

The rise of populism in Europe has been a major concern in the last decades for researchers and policymakers. Previous works have focused on economic and institutional factors as potential drivers of populism. This study aims to enrich the debate on populist success, by analyzing the relationship between cultural factors and political outcomes. For this purpose, Hofstede's cultural dimensions provide a useful framework for understanding how cultural values may shape the attitudes and behaviors of individuals in different societies. Relying on an original unbalanced panel dataset covering 26 European countries over the period 1994-2019 on European parliament election results over the last six electoral cycles, I employ OLS, random effects, and instrumental variable regression techniques to examine the relationship between six cultural variables (individualism, masculinity, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and indulgence) and the performance of populist parties in the European Union. Results show that culture has significant effects on voting preferences. In particular, the masculinity dimension is significantly and positively associated with the share of votes obtained by populist parties, while the indulgence dimension was found to be significantly and negatively associated with the rise of populism. Evidence also suggests that these effects are channeled mostly through far right and Eurosceptic movements. These findings support the idea that cultural factors play a crucial role in shaping the political landscape of European countries. The hope is that the topic of culture will receive more attention in future research investigating the causes of political extremism and populist sentiment.