What is the PopuList?
The PopuList offers researchers, journalists, policymakers and citizens an overview of populist, far-left and far-right parties in Europe from 1989 until 1 June 2026. The PopuList has been supported by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies, the Department of Politics of the University of York, the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, The Guardian, and the ECPR Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy, and has been used in numerous publications.
Background
The PopuList provides a list of European parties from 31 countries that can be classified as populist, far left, and/or far right. For the parties that belong to one of these categories, it also examines whether they are Eurosceptic. Version 4.0 of the database was launched in 2026 and includes all national elections from 1 January 1989 until 1 May 2026. The classifications have been reviewed by more than 100 academics.
The countries examined by The PopuList are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The PopuList 4.0
In May 2026, version 4.0 of The PopuList was launched. Updates from earlier versions include:
Update 1
A revision of several earlier classifications on the basis of new evidence and expert reassessment
Update 2
The inclusion of newly established parties and ideological transformations
Update 3
An extension of party coverage until 1 May 2026
Party Vote Share Over Time
The party vote share of far-left, far-left populist, populist, far-right populist, and far-right parties, as depicted below, is an approximation based on parliamentary election data primarily drawn from Döring and Manow (2024) and manually additions*. The graph excludes borderline cases of classified parties.
Our Definitions
Populist Parties
Parties that endorse the set of ideas that society is ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, “the pure people” versus “the corrupt elite,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people (Mudde 2004).
Eurosceptic Parties
Parties that express the idea of contingent or qualified opposition, as well as incorporate outright and unqualified opposition to the process of European integration. This includes both “hard Euroskepticism” (i.e., outright rejection of the entire project of European political and economic integration, and opposition to one’s country joining or remaining a member of the EU) and “soft Euroscepticism” (i.e., contingent or qualified opposition to European integration; Taggart and Sczcerbiak 2004).
Far-Left Parties
Parties that reject the underlying socio-economic structure of contemporary capitalism and advocate for alternative economic and power structures. They see economic inequality as the basis of existing political and social arrangements and call for a major redistribution of resources from existing political elites (March 2011).
Far-Right Parties
Parties that are nativist (which is an ideology that holds that states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group and that non-native elements are fundamentally threatening to the homogenous nation-state) and authoritarian (which is the belief in a strictly ordered society, in which infringements of authority are to be punished severely; Mudde 2007).
Vote Share (%) of Parties Over Time
On this website, you can find...
- An interactive as well as a PDF version of the dataset for a quick overview;
- The full dataset, codebook, and replication materials on our OSF page and GitHub repository;
- Country reports with more information about all included parties;
- Our open access article, published in the British Journal of Political Science, in which we elaborate on the coming into being of the dataset;
- Excel files of the new and previous versions of the PopuList: (version 1.0, version 2.0, version 3.0, and version 4.0).
Citation Guidelines
If you make use of The PopuList, please refer to…
The article in which we elaborate on The PopuList
And the dataset itself
Rooduijn, Matthijs, Andrea L.P. Pirro, Daphne Halikiopoulou, Caterina Froio, Stijn van Kessel, Sarah L. de Lange, Cas Mudde, and Paul Taggart (2023). The PopuList: A Database of Populist, Far-Left, and Far-Right Parties Using Expert-Informed Qualitative Comparative Classification (EiQCC). British Journal of Political Science, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123423000431.
Rooduijn, Matthijs, Andrea L.P. Pirro, Daphne Halikiopoulou, Caterina Froio, Stijn van Kessel, Sarah L. de Lange, Cas Mudde, and Paul Taggart (2023). The PopuList 3.0: An Overview of Populist, Far-left and Far-right Parties in Europe. www.popu-list.org. https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/2EWKQ.
*The vote-share changes of parties classified by the PopuList should be treated as rough approximations. For the period from 1993 to mid-2023, the PopuList draws on election data from the ParlGov dataset (Döring & Manow, 2024). Where incompleteness in this dataset was identified (for example, missing pre-2000 data for Croatia, or vote-share data for parties such as the Austrian KPÖ across several elections between 1990 and 2019) it was manually supplemented using the PPEG dataset (Krause et al., 2025), Nordsieck (2026), and official national election sources, yet discrepancies may remain. For the period from mid-2023 onwards, we relied primarily on Nordsieck (2026) and official national election sources. During the manual compilation, we found that for some PopuList parties, only coalition-level rather than individual vote-share data was available; we assessed these cases individually to determine whether a party’s vote share should be included in the main figure. For example, we excluded the French party La France Insoumise, which ran under the Nouveau Front Populaire coalition, or the Czech party Komunistická strana Cech a Moravy, which ran together with the parties Stačilo and Česká Strana Sociálne Demokratická, from the vote-share graph. It is also possible that some missing data for the pre-mid-2023 period reflects ParlGov’s treatment of parties that ran as part of coalitions, where the coalition’s ParlGov ID did not correspond to the individual party’s ParlGov ID as listed in the PopuList.