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

Abstract

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; Učeň 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 (Spáč 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 (Krašovec 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 Bértoa 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 higher level of volatility applies to the Baltic countries as well. The second reason for this is the richness of empirical material. The analysis is based on an examination of how different factors shape support for CPPs in comparison to support for the established parties that have been present in the Czech party system since the 1990s (ODS, ČSSD, KSČM, and KDU-ČSL). Both parties analysed here can be described as centrist populist. All the same, they differed in proposed solutions, which had implications for the profile of their voters and it is also important for the discussion about both the unique species of centrist populist parties and populist political parties in general, as we will later show. The paper is structured as follows. First, we introduce the concept of centrist populism as part of a description of the rise of the new CPPs in the context of the relative stability of Czech party politics. Second, employing the most widely used approaches in electoral behaviour research, we will analyse who supports CPPs. Since there has been very little effort dedicated to the analysis of CPPs, we seek to test various approaches in order to understand the electoral base of the new populist challengers in the Czech Republic. We then describe our data and our method of analysis before presenting the results. Our conclusion sums up our findings and considers their implications. It has become some sort of a cliché to state that there are very few terms in the contemporary comparative political research as contested as populism (Canovan 1999; Stanley 2008). Nevertheless, recent research has led to the emergence of a consensus on the "nucleus of populism" (Rooduijn 2014) constituted around three interrelated elements: 1) the virtuous people that are 2) betrayed by the essentially bad/corrupt elites, and 3) the restoration of the people`s sovereignty allegedly driven by populists themselves. As Stanley stated, the "thin nature [of populist ideology] means that it is unable to stand alone as a practical political ideology: it lacks the capacity to put forward a wide-ranging and coherent programme for the solution to crucial political questions" (Stanley 2008: 95). Indeed, history has shown a wide variety of populist actors that reflected the specifics of the environment, in which they arose, including populist radical right parties, agrarian populism and social populism (Pauwels 2014) as the most prominent empirical expressions of the "chameleonic" (Taggart 2004: 275) populist ideology. At the end of the 1990s, however, East-Central Europe witnessed the emergence of political parties, which lacked a clear ideological foundation and, at the same time, expressed very strong populist appeals. The term CPP has been used to capture the unusual identity of these new political parties based solely on populist appeals. In his analysis of party politics in post-communist Europe, Grigore Pop-Eleches (2010) defined new/centrist populism as one of the four types of unorthodox parties. New/centrist populist parties do not present a radical ideology. In contrast, they try to sidestep any ideology altogether and claim that they represent a non-ideological, anti-political alternative to the established parties. Their programmes are based on the claim that they fight the corrupt elite and pursue the interests of the people, promising to enhance living standards. As Pop-Eleches states (2010: 231), "such parties are almost completely unencumbered by ideological constraints and are therefore free to tell the voters what they want to hear".2 Similarly, Peter Učeň (2004) used the term centrist populism to describe political parties that entered the Slovak parliament in the 1998 and 2002 general elections. Učeň explains the "centrism" of these populist parties in terms of their self-presentation as alternatives to mainstream parties without taking extremist positions and being located "directly or indirectly [in] the ideological or geometric centre of the party system." (Učeň 2004: 47). Not only do these parties not present extreme or radical political attitudes, they lack a clear ideological profile altogether. Therefore, instead of a coherent ideology, the appeal of CPPs is often based on the promised competence of the leader, or on the claim to increase the participation of the people in the policy-making process. Both variants are supposed to lead to the same outcome – a better representation of the people. Going back to Stanley`s argument (Stanley 2008), CPPs lack a clear and coherent host ideology, the core of their identity is populism itself and solutions stemming from it, be they a competent leader, "common sense" or introduction of different forms of participatory or direct democracy. After the fall of communism and the first "grounding years" characterized by the turbulent development of political parties, Czech party politics became one of the most stable party systems in Central and Eastern Europe, typified by low levels of volatility (Powell and Tucker 2014) and a structure of well-institutionalized party competition established around the dominant left-right divide (Casal Bértoa 2014; Hloušek and Kopeček 2008). However, the 2010 and 2013 parliamentary elections called the previous stability of party politics into question (Havlík 2015a; Hanley 2011). The most spectacular feature of the general elections in 2010 and in 2013 was the success of CPPs, namely of Public Affairs (Věci veřejné, VV) and Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (Akce nespokojených občanů, ANO) – see Table 1.3 On the contrary, TOP 09 – another newcomer from the 2010 general election – is not a part of the analysis. Although TOP 09 showed some elements of an anti-establishment appeal and an anti-corruption agenda, the anti-establishment appeal was not in the core of the profile of the party. The party presented itself as a "purifier" seeking to heal a right-wing part of the spectrum. As Séan Hanley (2011: 124) put it, TOP 09 "tried to present itself primarily as representatives of the mainstream centre-right, offering purer versions of conservatism or liberal conservatism […], as actors that could fix the failure of the established parties to transform the Czech Republic into a modern Western-like market-based society". In other words, TOP 09 does not see itself as an alternative to all established parties (as the CPPs did) but merely as an alternative in the centre-right part of the party system. Similarly, Tomio Okamura`s Dawn of Direct Democracy (6.9% of votes in the 2013 general election) was also not included in the analysis, as the profile of the party was not clear before the election, and and its occasionally anti-Roma statements placed it close to the family of populist radical right parties. What the two CPPs had in common was a strong anti-establishment appeal, which depicted the old political parties as incompetent and corrupt. Indeed, corruption was presented as the most important feature of the established parties and the way they approach politics and governance (Havlík 2015b). VV, for instance, called politicians from the entire political spectrum "robber barons" or "political dinosaurs", i.e. those "who [have] been in politics for more than ten years, can't do anything other than politics, [understand] it as his trade and [start] to make deals.… who['ve] lost touch with reality and [ceased] to be useful." (Právo 2009) Three years later, ANO spoke of the "corrupt system of political parties" (ANO 2013). Both parties can be classified as populist – using strong anti-establishment appeals to construct a moral division between the two homogeneous groups – the "pure people" and "the corrupt elite" (Mudde 2004; Stanley 2008), although the purity of the people expressed mostly through numerous references to the common sense of the people and their ability to make right decisions was more visible in the case of VV than in the case of ANO (Havlík 2015b). All the same, none of the Czech populist newcomers presented a coherent programme in terms of "host ideologies". Instead, VV stated that it pursued "common sense" in contrast to standard ideological solutions, claiming that "ideologies are totally empty" (Česká televize 2010). Similarly, ANO's electoral platform was typical of the high proportion of valence issues as opposed to positional issues (Eibl 2014), and they stressed common sense, and added an emphasis on "simple and effective managing of the state" (ANO 2013). In other words, the populist appeals and programmatic vagueness of the two new political parties fit the definition of CPPs. Since there have not been any systemic CPP studies published of yet, our study is partly explanatory in its character, relying on both the established literature on populist voting and on the specifics of the supply side of the CPPs described above. The literature has provided many explanations for why people vote for populist political parties. We agree with Pauwels, who stated that "there is no reason to believe that 'populist voters' would make their choice fundamentally different from other voters" (Pauwels 2014: 53). Because it is reasonable to expect that specific populist factors drive the concrete voting choice, we use socio-demographic voting (i.e. cleavage-based), protest voting, issue voting, spatial and valence voting to explain the electoral support of CPPs in the Czech Republic. The sociological approach which emphasises the importance of people's social positions has a long tradition in the study of voting behaviour, going back to research conducted in the 1940s in the United States and to cleavage theory (Lipset and Rokkan 1967). The main assumption is that voting behaviour is shaped by social divides such as social class, religion or by place of residence. A social divide has to have three dimensions (structural, normative and organizational) to be considered a cleavage. In this part, we deal only with the structural dimension when we examine the effect of social structure. Deegan-Krause (2006) calls this aspect of cleavage voting the census divide. The results of the research applying a sociological approach to the study of populist parties show that these parties are supported by the "losers of modernization" (Betz 1994) who face the changes in social dynamics with difficulties, as a consequence of the "integration-demarcation" cleavage (Kriesi et al. 2008). Indeed, empirical research has shown the overrepresentation of some groups in society among voters of populist radical right parties that are supported by male, less educated, unskilled workers or members of the old middle class (Ivarsflaten 2005; Lubbers et al. 2002). Regarding the analysis of voting for CPPs, the problem is that these studies were focused on populist radical right parties. Similarly, the results of analyses of radical left populist parties, which describe their supporters as unemployed, less educated people are hardly applicable to CPPs. H1: The effect of the sociodemographic characteristics of voters will be lower in explaining of support for CPPs in comparison to support for the established4 political parties. Segments of the population, as determined by the census, are interconnected with political values. Basically, a value is an enduring belief that a specific mode of conduct or end-state of existence is preferable to the opposite modes or end-states (Rokeach 1973). Therefore, values can be seen as guidelines of peoples' attitudes and behaviour regarding political issues (Campbell et al. 1960; Fuchs and Klingemann 1990). In the literature, two types of political values are often distinguished. Values connected to opposite sides of the "old" socio-political cleavages (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) are usually labelled as old political values. The second category captures new political values including Inglehart's materialist/post-materialist values, environmental and economic growth values and libertarian/authoritarian values. Moreover, in the area of the former east bloc, the communism/post-communism dimension is important (Hloušek and Kopeček 2008). The literature shows that values are an important factor in the explanation of support for right wing populist parties. Oesch (2008) frames this explanation as "cultural", with attitudes towards community and identity playing a crucial role (Kitschelt and McGann 1997). The emergence of RPPs thus represent the authoritarian response to the dominance of libertarian values and multicultural models of living (Ignazi 1992; Minkenberg 2001). Accordingly, it is argued that the RPPs' success is explained by people's unease about the cultural challenges posed by the inflow and presence of an increasing number of foreign residents. H2: The effect of value voting will be lower in explanation of support for CPPs in comparison to support for the established political parties. Another approach explaining why people vote for populist parties is based on issue voting, linked mostly to the host ideology of populism. In contrast to value voting, issue voting is driven rather by the actual situation (see Carmines and Stimson 1980), whereas value voting reflects one's persistent patterns of thinking (Knutsen and Kumlin 2005). Deegan-Krause (2006) differentiates between value voting and issue voting more subtly. He uses the term "attitudinal voting" to refer to "normative" or "value" categories of cleavage voting. The word "issues" then refers to the interplay between attitude and partisanship. Van der Brug et al. (2000) and Ford and Goodwin (2014) point out the anti-immigration positions of voters of populist radical right parties in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. Pauwels (2014) identified the demand for a more regulatory role of the state in the economy as one of the drivers of voting for the populist left in Germany and in the Netherlands. While immigration, law and order and protectionist economy are not important issues for CPPs, the issue of corruption is a focal point of their populist discourse (Pop-Eleches 2010; Učeň 2007). As shown by Hanley and Sikk (2016), corruption was an important contextual factor behind the electoral success of anti-establishment reform parties in Central and Eastern Europe. Similarly, Engler (2016) showed an important effect of the perceived relative level of corruption on the electoral fortunes of new political parties, including the new populist challengers. H3: Voters who perceive corruption to be a salient issue are more likely to support CPPs. H4: Voters who perceive CPPs to be more competent in solving the most salient political issues are more likely to support them in comparison to the established political parties. H5a: Voters who evaluate the past state of the country economy negatively are more likely to support CPPs. H5b: Voters who evaluate their future economic situation negatively are more likely to support CPPs. Political cynicism has had a prominent position in the study of populist voting. This is not surprising if we take into consideration the core of populism defined by people-centrism closely tied to strong anti-establishment appeals. Nevertheless, the question of how to define the targets of the populist protest vote are First, a populist protest appeal negatively targets the representatives of established political parties who are usually depicted as and of the people, and thus a specific political class Although populism does not as such (Mudde and 2012), populist is at the face of i.e. the of as in political by the established parties (Canovan In his analysis of the populist radical right in (2006) showed the of political on the vote for Similarly, Pauwels see also Oesch identified the of low political and with on different populist political parties in Germany and the Netherlands. As shown by and in their study of voters for populist parties, protest attitudes voters for populist parties from voters for mainstream parties" and On the other (2008) and der Brug et al. (2000) not that political cynicism is a common feature for voting for populist radical right parties. 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