📌 The Puzzle:
This paper highlights the overlooked role of prior grievances from historical territorial loss as a significant factor behind support for nationalist populist parties. While not essential for the emergence of nationalist populism, territorial loss uniquely aligns with the backward-looking victimization framing that helps these parties win votes.
🔎 How the evidence was gathered (2020–2021, four countries):
- Cross-national experimental and observational data from original surveys conducted in 2020–2021 in Romania, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey.
- A quasi-natural experiment created by the sudden emergence of a new nationalist populist party in Romania between survey waves, leveraged to test temporal ordering and stability of attitudes.
🧠Key findings:
- Territorial loss attitudes are a robust predictor of support for nationalist populist parties across the sampled countries.
- Territorial loss is not a necessary condition for nationalist populism, but it dovetails especially well with parties' backward-looking victimhood narratives.
- A trade-off emerges for governing populists: priming past territorial losses attracts voters who care about territorial issues but alienates those indifferent to those issues.
- The Romanian quasi-natural experiment shows that loss attitudes are stable over time and temporally prior to support for the new nationalist populist party.
- Variation by national context is evident, indicating conditional effects across Romania, Hungary, Germany, and Turkey.
💡 Why it matters:
- Introduces historical territorial loss as an underappreciated driver of nationalist populist support and clarifies how party framing exploits that grievance.
- Explains a strategic trade-off for populist incumbents considering whether to emphasize past territorial losses, with clear implications for campaign messaging and coalition-building.
