The relationship between populism and ethno-territorial politics has emerged repeatedly in empirical studies outside Western Europe. This article presents the main aim of the special issue, which is the systematic and empirically based investigation of the linkages between populism and ethno-territorial ideologies in Western European states. By introducing a conceptual map, in which the defining characteristics of populism, regionalism, statenationalism, and Euroscepticism are identified and conceptualized, the article proceeds with the possible linkage points between both concepts. It also proposes a smallest common denominator relationship between populism and ethno-territorial ideologies in that the notion of 'homogeneous people' becomes inexorably connected to the concept of 'nation' or 'region' pitted against political, economic, and cultural elites operating at various levels of government. By foreshadowing and discussing several of the key findings of the empirical case studies presented in this special issue, the introductory article highlights important emerging trends. Most crucially, only radical-right parties (both regionalist and state-nationalist) appear to be inherently and stably populist. The same parties are also clearly Eurosceptic. By contrast, several regionalist parties, positioned in the mainstream left or right, tend to adopt a populist discourse only incidentally and temporarily.
This article investigates how and why Austrian parties have (re)constructed claims of national sovereignty and brought them to the centre of political competition. Theoretically, claims for national sovereignty are directed at recovering the people's autonomy from 'sinister' elites and 'harmful' outsiders like immigrants. As such claims vary in terms of policy content, salience, and discursive means, this article uses the analysis of manifestos and speeches to ascertain how the radical-right populist Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) constructed sovereignty claims in 2013 and 2017. Furthermore, it shows how the mainstream right Austrian People's Party (ÖVP) adopted these claims, significantly narrowing the gap to the far-right FPÖ on the national and economic dimension of sovereignty, and largely renounced its pro-European and antisovereignist positions by 2017. In a second step, we examine whether the claims by these two parties match the preferences of their voters. Here, the findings suggest that the FPÖ's sovereignty claims broadly correspond to the demands of its voters whereas ÖVP voters only partially express support for such claims, mainly on the national sovereignty investigating in detail the form and conditions of their occurrence.
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