ABSTRACT
Several empirical work is made on populism, scholars such as Albertazzi, Delwit, and Heinisch, have been focusing on how populist parties deal with government participation. The author proposes a typology of populist parties and classifies parties in three West European countries according to this typology. He examines which parties can be labelled as populist in the party systems of Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Finally, after a careful classification and measurement of populism, the author turns to the main research question by exploring who votes for populist parties and why. He attempts to classify political parties in accordance with the proposed typology, by using party programmes as main data sources. The author also runs several multinominal logistic models in an attempt to evaluate the robustness of his earlier findings. He presents the theoretical framework that will be used to explain populist voting. The author explains similarities and disparities between the different electorates.
