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Radical parties have been found to succeed under conditions of mass polarization. It is argued that their message resonates better with voters at the extremes of an ideological spectrum. This paper investigates if the reverse also holds, meaning that radical parties may contribute to the polarization of the public. I test this claim in the Netherlands, a country that has experienced the rise of populist radical right parties since 2002, using a synthetic control model built with a pool of comparable countries and Eurobarometer survey data. Results show that, after the rise of Pim Fortuyn and Geert Wilders, the level of polarization among the Dutch public increased more than it otherwise would have. These findings contribute to understanding the connection between elite- and mass-level polarization, and the consequences of populist radical right parties’ emergence in Western Europe.
How do citizens evaluate democracy? Previous literature trying to address this question has often relied on single indicators to assess citizens’ assessment of democracy. This article contributes to this debate by using multiple indicators measuring different attributes to find a summary measure of citizens’ evaluations of democracy. Using the special module of the sixth round of the European Social Survey ‘Europeans’ understandings and evaluations of democracy’ and applying Bayesian factor analysis with country random effects, this article tests whether multiple indicators form an underlying trait measuring citizens’ evaluations of democracy. It finds the scores of this measure at the individual and country levels and validates this measure against other measures built at the system level, including the ‘satisfaction with democracy’ indicator, also illustrating its functioning as a dependent and an independent variable.