Globalization and populism in Europe

Recent micro-level studies have suggested that globalization - in particular, economic globalization - breeds political polarization and populism. This study examines if those results generalize by examining the country-level association between vote shares for European populist parties and economic globalization. Using data on vote share for 267 right-wing and left-wing populist parties in 33 European countries 1980-2016, and globalization data from the KOF-institute, we find no evidence of a positive association between economic globalization and populism. In many cases, the partial correlation is significantly negative. EU-membership is associated with 5 to 10 percentage units larger vote shares for right-wing populism in both random and fixed effects models.