Wednesday, 13th March 2019
13:30 - 14:30
CESS Seminar Rooms - 3 George Street Mews
An Integrated Model of Populist Party Strategy and the Spatial Dynamics of Political Distrust
This experiment will complement a range of observational analyses I am carrying out as part of my MPhil thesis research project. The project analyses the relationship between support for populist parties and how these parties frame particular issues. In particular, it looks at how support varies where parties ‘blur’ a given issues by taking an ambiguous policy stance, and how this blurring interacts with individual-level salience of the issue in question. Another key theoretical variable is the spatial distance between individuals and parties on given policy dimensions. This includes distance between individuals’ positions and populist party positions, as well as spatial distance to mainstream parties, which I theorise acts as a proxy for political distrust.