How Do They Get In? Radical Parties and Government Participation in European Democracies

Abstract

Despite their alleged anti-systemness and ‘non-coalitionability’, radical right and radical left parties have, since the early 1990s, both supported and entered coalition governments in a number of European liberal democracies. Using the classical ‘size and ideology’ framework, this study sets out to examine how – or, put differently, under what circumstances – radical right and radical left parties are able to overcome the obstacles associated with governing and enter coalition governments. Inspired by previous observations regarding the complex and multicausal nature of radical government participation, the study relies on a configurational method. By means of a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) of 37 radical parties at 207 coalition formation instances in 22 (Western and Central and Eastern) European countries, the article sheds light on different paths that lead to government inclusion (and exclusion) of radical actors. The empirical evidence indicates that electoral success in combination with a fairly similar policy position to a weak prime minister party is sufficient for government inclusion. The paths to government exclusion, by contrast, underline the importance of ideological distance in combination with size-related factors.

Studying European Radical Left Parties since the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1990–2019): A Scoping Review

“…Likewise, discourse analysis has been applied to left‐populist communication, but could easily be expanded to other (non‐populist) features of equal ideological value for RLPs, like anti‐capitalism or class appeals. Other methods and data sources, such as configurational methods (Fagerholm, 2019), or the study of parties’ legislative activity (De Giorgi & Cancela, 2019) and social media (Ben‐David & Fernández, 2016; Larsson, 2017), have already been used successfully and can open new opportunities for the study of RLPs.…”

Pariahs or Partners?

“…Other observers were less optimistic about the prospects for party system institutionalisation at that time (Mair 1997;Elster et al 2000). In one of the most recent and comprehensive empirical accounts of party system institutionalisation 2 and stability in Central and Eastern Europe, Enyedi and Casal Bértoa (2018) illustrate that the initial scepticism was not completely unwarranted. Low levels of party membership, for instance, remain a characteristic feature in post-Communist parties.…”

“…The familiarity with parties and their positions had increased markedly after a decade's worth of party competition, elections, and the government participation of different political forces (Ágh 1998;Toole 2000;Pop-Eleches 2010). Hence, by the turn of the millennium, it became possible to speak of a basic level of party system institutionalisation in the region, even though the level of stability was considerably lower than in the established Western European democracies (Enyedi and Casal Bértoa 2018;Emanuele, Chiaramonte, and Soare 2020).…”

“…First, a temporal bias emerges from the frequent comparison of Central and Eastern European elections since 1990 with the whole post-war period in Western Europe, which can obscure similar trends in both regions in the same period. Second, Western European patterns are often compared to a broader sample of post-Communist countries (Powell and Tucker 2014;Enyedi and Casal Bértoa 2018), which includes post-Soviet or Balkan countries that differ significantly from the post-Communist EU member states in terms of democratic consolidation (Emanuele, Chiaramonte, and Soare 2020, 312-13).…”

Where is the middle? Considering the socio-political centre in Germany

“…Movement towards or away from a middle need not encompass an entire gamut of policies. Any party could potentially enter, or leave, and transform the middle, as indicated in studies examining ideological congruence, and others the pragmatism of 'left' or 'right' outliers in moving towards, and mainstream parties moving away from, 'centrist' policy or even constitutive positions (Abou-Chadi, 2016; Abou-Chadi & Krause, 2018;Bergman & Flatt, 2020;Fagerholm, 2019;Krause, 2020;Krause & Giebler, 2020;McDonnell & Werner, 2018;Tavits, 2007;Werner, 2020). This is not to say that an equilibrium similar with past policy regimes cannot be reasserted (McDonald & Budge, 2005).…”