Cultural Divides and Populist Voting: Evidence from a Global Panel

Michal Brzezinski ()
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Michal Brzezinski: University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences

No 2026-12, Working Papers from Faculty of Economic Sciences, University of Warsaw

Abstract: Cultural heterogeneity—the within-country dispersion of values measured across hundreds of survey items—predicts populist voting across 60 democracies from 1970 to 2019. I compute fractionalization and polarization indices on Integrated Values Survey value items and regress three populism measures on these indices in a dynamic two-way fixed-effects panel with country-level clustering. A one-within-country-standard-deviation increase in cultural polarization is associated with a rise in vote-weighted ideational populism of about 14\ robust to system-GMM and to a sensitivity analysis for selection on unobservables. A V-Party-based GAL–TAN decomposition shows that the mobilization skews toward culturally-authoritarian parties, with no detectable movement in the progressive-libertarian camp. Including behavioral items in the heterogeneity measure eliminates the effect; the values-versus-behaviors boundary is empirically decisive.

Keywords: populism; cultural heterogeneity; fractionalization; polarization; GAL–TAN (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 D72 P16 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 2026
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