Classifying European Political Parties
Experts generally agree that populist political leaders or parties display high levels of anti-elitism, although definitions of populism vary.
To classify populist parties, three measures are used:
- anti-elite ratings from the 2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES)
- Norris’ Global Party Survey
- The PopuList
The CHES, conducted from February to May 2020, surveyed 421 political scientists specializing in political parties and European integration to evaluate the 2019 positions of 277 European political parties across all European Union member states.
CHES results are regularly used by academics to classify parties with regard to their left-right ideological leanings, their key party platform positions and their degree of populism, among other things.
Author's summary: Classifying European parties as populist based on anti-elitism and expert surveys.