The project deals with the conceptional understanding and empirical analysis of populism as an attitude of elites within political parties. It starts with the recent evolution of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) within the German party system. While qualitative inquiries of the party platforms and manifestos indicate a more moderate position at the early stage of the party’s history, quantitative analyses of candidates demonstrate that the AfD elites had strong populist attitudes from the beginning. Based on this case, it is examined in a cross-national perspective to what extent populism is visible beyond official party manifestos as individual attitudes of party elites and how the variation of these attitudes can be explained.
The project is divided into two parts. The first part studies the AfD as a ‘critical’ case, by analyzing both the party ideology and the attitudes of its elites from the point of view of populism. The second part focuses on Western European democracies in comparison. The empirical basis is manifesto data as well as survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) and the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS).
Principal Investigator: Dr. Marcel Lewandowsky (cumulative habilitation project).
Letzte Änderung: 6. February 2018