Who Do Populist Radical Right Parties Stand for? Representative Claims, Claim Acceptance and Descriptive Representation in the Austrian FPÖ and German AfD

ABSTRACT

Populist radical right parties are known for focussing on a vague idea of ‘the people’ and rejecting social groups like immigrants. The representative relationship between parties and voters, however, is a positive one. Thus, this article investigates (a) who populist radical right parties claim to represent, (b) whether these groups accept the claim, and (c) whether the parties indeed represent these groups descriptively. Our analysis of the manifestos, voters and parliamentary groups of the Austrian Freedom Party and the Alternative for Germany shows, first, that these parties have markedly different conceptualisations of ‘the people’. Further, we find that both parties claim to represent native families, pensioners, members of the police and armed forces as well as inhabitants of rural areas. While most of these groups reject this representative claim in both countries, the AfD and, to a lesser extent, the FPÖ indeed represent these population segments in the parliaments. Thus, this article contributes to our understanding of populist radical right parties’ roles in representative democracies by identifying a gap between these parties’ representative claims towards social groups and those groups’ voting behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• radical right
• parties
• representative claims
• descriptive representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Reinhard Heinisch is Professor of Comparative Austrian politics at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He is also a European Studies Center affiliate of the University of Pittsburgh, USA. His research is centered on comparative populism, political parties, the radical right, and democracy and has appeared in journals such as Party Politics, West European Politics, Democratization, Representation, Comparative European Politics, as well as Politics and Religion among many others. Since 2019 he has led a research team in the EU funded Horizon 2020 project on ‘Populism and Civic Engagement’.

Annika Werner is a Senior Lecturer at the Australian National University, Canberra. Her research focuses on the development and challenges of democracy, with a special focus on the role of political parties, and has been published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Electoral Studies, Democratization and the International Political Science Review, among others. She is Steering Group member of the Manifesto Project (MARPOR/CMP) and co-editor of the Australian Journal of Political Science. E-mail: [email protected]

ORCID

Reinhard Heinisch http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0019-2423

Annika Werner http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7341-0551

Notes

1 While we would ideally also investigate the substantive representation provided by these two parties, the time frame since the elections is too short for such an analysis.

2 FPÖ-MEP Andreas Mölzer claimed the FPÖ was becoming a workers’ party of a new type. https://www.ots.at/presseaussendung/OTS_20090303_OTS0065/moelzer-fpoe-entwickelt-sich-zur-arbeiterpartei-neuen-typs.

3 These categories were formed inductively by grouping the available information.

4 Other religions are not mentioned in the manifesto.

5 The FPÖ also claimed to represent welfare recipients. The information regarding the MPs welfare history could not be retrieved.