Why do Democracies Experience Antisystem Movements: Statistical Analysis from Interwar Europe (1919-1939)

Abstract

Why do some democracies experience antisystem movements whereas others do not? Enlisting novel cross-national data from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project and empirically focusing on interwar Europe, this article statistically tests widely-accepted theoretical claims in the literature on political authoritarianism. Logistic regression models applied on 22 interwar European democracies reveal that economic crises are a major cause behind antisystem movement emergence whereas the evidence for attributing causal effect to party institutionalization is not strong enough. Furthermore, the results show that in polarized party systems, the support of center-left/right parties is a crucial factor that leads to antisystem movement emergence in democratic polities.