Political opportunity structures and right‐wing extremist party success

Abstract

West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention over the past two decades due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe during this period. This article puts forward an explanation of the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been considered previously. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote. Then, it turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote, including institutional, party-system and conjunctural variables. The article concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe. The findings go some way towards challenging the conventional wisdom as to how the advance of the parties of the extreme right may be halted.West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal attention in the academic literature due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support in this third wave of right-wing extremist party activity; instead, their electoral fortunes have risen and fallen over the last two decades.That this variation -both over time and across countries -has attracted relatively little attention in the literature is not overly surprising. For one thing, there continues to be a shortage of comparative studies on the extreme right, particularly on its voters. In addition, many of the studies that do exist, not surprisingly have tended to focus only on why right-wing extremist parties have been successful, rather than on why they have not.The few works that have addressed the issue of the variation in the electoral support for the parties of the extreme right across Western Europe have tended to offer only partial explanations for this phenomenon. Jackman and Volpert (1996), for example, assess the importance of electoral system, party system and economic factors on the right-wing extremist party vote, but they do not consider the impact of different socio-demographic variables. Likewise, Abedi (2002) concentrates on the effect of party system factors, but fails to

Labor Market Competition with Immigrants and Political Polarization

“…Our approach and results highlight the need to closely identify the group of voters affected by immigration in order to track the electoral consequences. Failure to do so might explain e.g., the mixed empirical results on the relationship between unemployment and support for far-right parties (Arzheimer and Carter, 2006;Golder, 2003). Importantly, our results show that the political consequences of immigration are not only due to cultural concerns or concerns about the fiscal burden of immigration, and they question the status of labor market competition theory as a "zombie theory" (Hainmueller and Hopkins 2014) in immigration research.…”

Welfare Chauvinism? Refugee Flows and Electoral Support for Populist-Right Parties in Industrial Democracies

“…In fact, previous studies on this topic have long assumed migration as one of the main causes, but empirical evidence remains mixed. While, Halla et al (2012), Arzheimer (2009), Arzheimer and Carter (2006), Golder (2003) and Knigge (1998) find a positive association between migration and support for populist-right parties, Norris (2005) and Lubbers et al (2002) do not confirm the earlier findings. While a lot of these studies focus on immigrants, what is indeed missing in the current scientific debate is the role of refugees and the causal understanding of the mechanisms through which refugees flows would increase support 1 This controversial advertisement welcoming refugees by Sweden Democrats, a populist-right party is widely cited in the press, see: https://www.rt.com/news/323236-sweden-democrats-refugees-video/ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317978/Torn-apart-open-door-migrants-Sweden-seen-Europe-s-liberalnation-violent-crime-soaring-Far-Right-march-reports-SUE-REID.html 2 See: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/denmark-refugees-immigration-law/431520/ 3 We identify 'populist-right' parties as those which according to the literature are protest, nativist, openly racist, or extremist parties which are anti-immigrant, islamophobic and anti-establishment in their platform.…”

Voices from the far right: a text analysis of Swedish parliamentary debates

“…The dismissive strategy, first, consists of avoiding the challenging party's main issue (in the case of the SD, immigration); the idea here is to de-emphasize the salience of the subject, in order to render it more difficult for the radical right to mobilize along the correlated rift (see also Arzheimer &Carter 2006 andArzheimer 2009, p. 439). The mainstream party thereby signals to voters that the issue is insignificant.…”

“…There is strong empirical evidence that the adversarial strategy increases support for the niche party, mainly by enhancing voters' attention to the challenging party's main issue, thereby increasing the possibility of politicizing it and gaining from it electorally. It is also widely argued that the policy convergence between mainstream parties that might follow from the adversarial strategy, creates advantageous political opportunity structures for the new party (Kitschelt 1995, Minkenberg 2001, Arzheimer & Carter 2006, Meguid 2008, Schumacher & Van Kersbergen 2016.…”