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Prof. Dr. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser

Project: The North-South diffusion of the radical right script

International Research College

Pontifical Catholic University of Chile

Alumni, Senior Fellow from 30 June to 31 July 2023

Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is Professor at the Institute of Political Science at the Pontificial Catholic University of Chile, Associate Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). In 2021, he visited SCRIPTS as a senior research fellow. His main area of research is comparative politics with a special interest in the ambivalent relationship between populism and democracy. He is the co-author, with Cas Mudde, of Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017) and co-editor, with Tim Bale, of Riding the Populist Wave. Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Research focus

  • Comparative Politics
  • Contemporary Populist Forces in Europe, Latin America and the US
  • Populist Attitudes and Conceptions of Democracy
  • Populism and Negative Political Identity
  • Populism and Militant Democracy



Current Research Projects at SCRIPTS
During his research stay at SCRIPTS, Christóbal continued to work on populism in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on the ambivalent relationship between populism and liberal democracy, and finished two interrelated contributions. The first contribution was an edited volume on the transformation of the mainstream right in Western Europe due to the electoral breakthrough and consolidation of populist radical right parties. With his co-author Tim Bale (Queen Mary University of London), they argue that mainstream right parties are experiencing a tension between, on the one hand, the need to continue to appeal to well-heeled voters, many of whom express the liberal and progressive values associated with the "silent revolution" and, on the other hand, the need to appeal to voters who sympathize with the authoritarian and nativist ideas associated with the "silent counter-revolution" pursued by the populist radical right. The second contribution was a paper about the concept of democracy held by populist citizens (co-author: Steven van Hauwaert, University of Surrey). During this fellowship, he undertook a more detailed empirical analysis of the dataset on populist attitudes and the concepts of democracy preferred by voters. This dataset is generated from a representative survey they conducted in twelve European countries before the 2019 EU elections. This analysis resulted in a SCRIPTS Working Paper “Supporting and Rejecting Populist Parties in Western Europe” (co-authors: Carsten Wegscheider and Steven M. Van Hauwaert).

See the publication list of Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser here.

SCRIPTS Working Paper

Kaltwasser, Cristóbal Rovira/Wegscheider, Carsten/Van Hauwaert, Steven M. 2022: Supporting and Rejecting Populist Parties in Western Europe. SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 14, Berlin: Cluster of Excellence 2055 "Contestations of the Liberal Script – SCRIPTS".