Predicting Elections Through Populism

Populist sentiment might determine election results

We have reached the end of our project and, to be humble, we find that computational social science, in its attempt to quantify and rationalize the complex decisions and actions of human beings, requires extensive efforts to reinterpret and correctly formulate data analysis to achieve its fundamental ends. People, their ideas, and drives do not fit into quantifiable categories. However, we have successfully reached our goals. We have created a populism index across the European union and isolated features that indicate a populist. While our outcome is possibly biased by qualitative complexity, we have found it has provided a wealth of insights into the political climate of Europe.

One key lesson we have absorbed is that populism is fostered specifically by economic and political discontent with established institutions. When people believe their economic interests are in danger due to external threats, may these be those of established elites or impoverished migrants, they become much more receptive to populist messages. The ‘populist,’ in our case, is not some mutant species that is segregated from the general citizenry (as shown by our marked failure to K-Means cluster populists away from the general populace). Instead, it is ordinary people who turn to populism as a response to their problems due to their frustration with institutions which alienate them from their material well-being and sense of democratic agency.

Results

In France, we found a 56–44 divide between anti-populist and populist voters, respectively. Hence, we expected Emmanuel Macron to defeat Marine Le Pen in the recent French Election by this amount. Surprisingly. Marcon obtained 66% of the total electorate, indicating a French electorate less inclined to support the Far Right than we had predicted. We speculate that this discrepancy could have occurred due to either center-right to right-wing populist-identified voters balking at supporting Le Pen who they perceived to be an outlandish candidate and/or to the surge in left-wing & centrist voters rallying against reactionary politics.

Perplexingly, both Germany & Spain harbor more extreme attitudes than their current political representations would suggest, with 59% & 63% of voters determined to be populist. In Spain, this could show the lingering influence of the Franco régime, which discouraged the presence of a far-right political option while drawing many in the center-right Partido Popular to espouse Franco’s national-conservative doctrine. Yet in Germany, as Professor Binnig pointed out, one must normalize these results based upon reigning cultural and social attitudes and determine whether a shift in political attitudes has occurred. The Germans, as both legend and fact have it, are a rather pessimistic bunch about both about their economic future and that of the EU, even while they oppose extreme measures to alter this predicament. Thus, to further our analysis, we could compare this data to historical values to observe shifts in potential sentiment which may forebode the eruption of populist indignation.

To the contrary, we found surprisingly low scores in populist sentiment throughout Eastern Europe, most remarkably in the Visegrád Group, including Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Even while Victor Orbán embraces perhaps the most extreme attitude against refugees and foreign integration within all of Europe, based upon our calculations, only approximately 30% of Hungarians were predicted to be populist. This inconsistency also warns us of blindly selecting six features to determine populist attitudes without adjusting for the circumstances of each individual nation. A high approval of the current government may correspond to greater and not lesser populist sentiment in many Eastern European nations.

Unsurprisingly, we observe Britain to be a stronghold of populism, revealing the lingering resentment that characterized Brexit.

The key features (questions asked of survey respondents) in particular we found to be the most relevant were:

How do you think the general economic situation has changed over the past 12 months?

Economic growth/decline remains a critical factor that influences the development of populist appeals. When a country is in danger of economic decline, voters begin to reject established governmental institutions to halt this deterioration.

What is your opinion of the European Union?

If an individual is inclined to distrust the European Union, they become much more responsive to parties which seek to halt the presence of this institution, and thus tend to select populist parties critical of the status quo over social-liberal alternatives.

What is your opinion of the government?

Likewise, when a voter disregards their own government, they seek to “overthrow” their reigning political representation through selecting populist candidates.

How satisfied are you with the way democracy works in your country?

Similarly, those who believe their form of liberal-democracy has become fundamentally corrupted are inclined to seek alternatives that promote the will of the common people.

Overall, do you think [insert nation here] gains or loses from trade with other nations?

This feature suggests that economic factors play a critical role in fueling populist sentiment. When people perceive foreigners to economically harm their interests, they choose to promote populist parties that seek to restore national supremacy against foreign (both economic and socio-cultural) intrusions.

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: “The system is stacked against people like me.”

Because this feature reflects the notion that an individual’s own economic interests are at odds with those of the governing élite, one would anticipate people reflecting such views to be highly amenable to populist rhetoric.

The distribution of anti-populists and populists and their opinions can be visualized with the following parallel set visualization:

This visualization can be interpreted by following the stream of populists and anti-populist through their responses to each question.

These features came out as we hoped. They show that our analysis, based on voting history and party preference still held closely to the ideology of populism. These features indicated predominantly economic and political as opposed to a socio-cultural discontent drives populist sentiment. This may reveal that social attitudes may reflect the current economic stances of nations and that in order to reduce populist sentiment, one should consider promoting economic cooperation between nations and global integration that incorporates the entire populace instead of merely supporting these “established elites.”

Furthermore, by using this data to predict future electoral outcomes, we find that populism, while magnifying its impacts, does not yet seem capable of toppling European institutions as it has those of the United States. All together we found our work to be strongly predictive of sentiments within a country. While there are confounding factors and a few outliers, it seems our understanding of populism across the EU has shed light on the current political climate.