Abstract. This article attempts to explain the impact of department‐level political opportunity structures on the electoral success of the French Front National (FN) in the 2004 regional elections. The concept of ‘political opportunity structure’ refers to the degree of openness of a particular political system and the external institutional or socio‐economic constraints and opportunities that it sets for political parties. Comparative analysis across subnational units is conducted where the 94 departments of mainland France are the units of analysis. The significance of electoral institutions (district magnitude), party competition (effective number of parties), electoral behaviour (turnout) and socioeconomic conditions (immigration and unemployment) on the ability of the FN to gather votes across the departments is assessed by means of multiple regression. The empirical results show that the subnational political opportunity structures have been of great importance for the FN. Some four out of the five independent variables are statistically significant and explain a great deal of the variance in the two dependent variables (electoral support for FN list and index of electoral success). Turnout and district magnitude are negatively correlated with the electoral fortunes of the FN, while unemployment and the effective number of party lists are positively correlated with the success of the FN in the regional elections. The variable that indicates the share of non‐European immigrants does not provide additional explanatory power in a statistically significant way.
Political trust has in previous studies mainly been associated, either positively or negatively with a set of political variables, such as subjective knowledge of and interest in political issues, political efficacy, national pride, post‐materialist values and corruption permissiveness. More recently, it has been debated whether or not indicators of social capital also have an impact on political trust. It has been argued that social capital helps to sustain civic virtues and that lack of it will create democratic problems like political dissatisfaction and declining political participation. While trends in social capital seem stable and high at the aggregate level in Finland, the level of political trust has varied to a much larger degree. In this article, indicators of social capital, political variables and social background variables are set against the Finns’ trust in politicians and the parliament as well as their satisfaction with democracy. The analysis shows that social capital, as defined by a set of variables comprised of interpersonal trust and voluntary organisational activism, does not, en bloc, prove to be a powerful predictor of political trust. However, when the social capital items are examined as single factors, interpersonal trust seems to have strong impact on all levels of political trust, while the influence of voluntary organisational activity is less evident.
Since the 1980s, the main interest in radical right‐wing studies has been on occurrences of the phenomenon. Non‐occurrences have not received much attention, although they could have something to offer the field as well. This article focuses on the ‘Finnish exception’ and by approaching the theme in terms of single‐issue and protest voting theories, asks to what extent the electorate in Finland differs from those of other European countries with respect to the two crucial sets of attitudes for radical right‐wing parties: those towards the political system and those towards immigration. After the country comparison, the focus turns to the Finnish case to explore where in the electorate anti‐system and anti‐immigrant appeal would find the strongest support. The data used in the study is taken from the European Social Survey 2002–2003, which is analysed by principal component analysis and linear regression. The country comparison shows that in the light of single‐issue and protest voting theories, the attitudinal atmosphere in Finland provides a breeding ground for radical right populism as fertile as that in most other West European countries. Second, the case analysis of Finland reveals that anti‐immigrant attitudes and dissatisfaction with the political system are most accentuated among older, poorly educated men with no interest in politics.
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