Political dissatisfaction and the rise of authoritarian-populism: an analysis of South America and Europe

Abstract

In the past few years, we have seen the rise of authoritarian-populist actors, both in consolidated democracies and in those that are not yet well established. In this article, we analyze whether the increase of political dissatisfaction explains the growth in political support for populist authoritarianism in South America and Europe. We hypothesize that an environment of political dissatisfaction explains this phenomenon. We analyzed the cases of Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Spain and the Netherlands. We used data from the World Values Survey and electoral results, from 2005 to 2019. We verified that there is a disconnection between support for democracy and dissatisfaction with its performance, which favors, in some cases, the growth of authoritarian-populism. Besides that, those who vote for these actors are more dissatisfied. However, the hypothesis is partially confirmed, since dissatisfaction is insufficient to explain all cases, while other factors, such as the conflict of values and political culture, are more relevant.