Nationalism in Populist Party Agendas: Comparing Europe and Latin America

• In Event: Right-Wing Populism

Abstract

Two major trends characterise global political developments. First, populist parties are garnering momentum across different regions. Second, most of these parties, primarily from the right but also from the left end of the political spectrum, are utilising nationalist narratives that emphasise sovereignty and support policies that place the nation first. While, however, these trends have been accompanied by an increase in academic interest, this burgeoning body of research rarely engages in cross-regional comparisons. This paper addresses this gap by comparing the ways in which populist parties utilise nationalist narratives in two regions which have both experienced the rise of such parties: Europe and Latin America. We employ a theoretical framework that draws on the civic-ethnic distinction in the study of nationalism and a mixed methods approach to compare populist parties in the two regions. First, we use MARPOR data to capture the use of nationalism in far right and far left populist parties in across 8 countries including Spain, Cyprus, Greece, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. Second, we arrange parties into pairs and compare (a) a set of European with a set of Latin American far right parties; and (b) a set of European with a set of Latin American far left parties using the OpenAI’s ‘Whisper’ and ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’ (GPT) models. Our results suggest that the use of nationalism varies significantly across the two regions between, but most importantly also within each party family. Our contribution is threefold. First, we are among the first to compare the nationalist agendas of European and Latin American parties. Second, we offer a systematic and generalisable framework for theorising nationalism both within and across different party families. Third we offer a framework for operationalising and measuring these different types of nationalism empirically across different regions.

Authors

• Daphne Halikiopoulou, University of York

• Carlos Melendez, Universidad Diego Portales

• Lisa Zanotti, Diego Portales University