Economic Crisis, Populist Attitudes, and the Birth of Podemos in Spain

The chapter analyses the consequences of the economic recession in Spain for the development of populist attitudes and the appearance of a left-wing populist party, Podemos. In the first section, we contextualise the Spanish case and we show that Podemos’ voters are the ones that hold highest levels of populist attitudes. In the second section, we analyse economic and political correlates of populist attitudes among the citizenry. We show that income, sociotropic evaluations of the national economy, political sophistication, being left-wing oriented, and not being close to the incumbent are positively related to populist attitudes. In the last section, we use populist attitudes to explain vote choice and show that Podemos was the party most affected by these attitudes in the 2015 election.