Emergence of the unified right- and left-wing populism—When radical societal changes become more important than ideology

Abstract If among humans a single concern starts to dominate over all others, a society may start approaching a tipping point, where radical political, economic and societal changes are likely to occur. It is easy to imagine that a societal tipping point when two concerns such as economic and immigrant substantially dominate over all others can be even faster to reach than if just one concern prevails separately. Here, for a group of EEA countries comprising of old democracies and ex-socialist countries we analyse the total populist votes as the sum of right-wing (RW) and left-wing (LW) populist votes within the European Economic Area (EEA) since both populism share the negative stance towards globalization, NATO, and the EU. We find a substantial heterogeneity between old democracies and ex-socialist countries. For the old democracies we find that the percentage of the total populist votes in a given country depends on the percentage of immigrants in this country’s population and the total immigration inflow into the entire EEA. We report a negative dependence between the long-term economic growth and the total populism. For both ex-socialist countries and old democracies we demonstrate that the weaker the immigrants are integrated in a society, the stronger the total populism. However, compared to populism in old democracies, populism in ex-socialist countries is more sensitive to both (i) the rate of immigrant’s integration and (ii) the immigrants’ fraction in total population.