Populist Radical Right Party-Voter Policy Representation in Western Europe

ABSTRACT

In this study we assess policy representation by populist radical right (PRR) parties in ten West European countries. Going beyond aggregate left-right or socio-cultural (GAL-TAN) dimensions of political conflict, we study representation on policy issues related to the PRR parties’ core ideological features nativism, populism, and authoritarianism. Analysing data from party expert and voter surveys, we find that the PRR parties provide largely unique policy positions that are congruent with their voters’ preferences in terms of their opposition to immigration and the European Union. By contrast, the parties are less representative in terms of their value conservative and authoritarian positions on gay rights and civil liberties. The findings have relevance for our understanding of party strategy, voter behaviour, and the dimensionality of political competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Policy representation
• populist radical right
• issue congruence
• party strategy

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Annika Werner, Heiko Giebler, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Anders Backlund is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the School of Social Sciences at Södertörn University, Stockholm. His research deals with mainstream party reactions to the populist radical right, with a particular focus on government formation and policy adaptation. E-mail: [email protected]

Ann-Cathrine Jungar is Associate Professor in political science at the School of Social Sciences at Södertörn University, Stockholm. She has a Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and her research deals with right-wing populism in Europe with a specific focus on the Nordic countries. She is currently leading two research projects on populists in government (financed by the Wallenberg foundation) and populist radical right party youth sections (financed by the Swedish Research Council).

ORCID

Anders Backlund http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4717-6842

Ann-Cathrine Jungar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7203-9495

Notes

1 The most disputable case is Alternative for Germany (AfD), which at the time when the data used in this study were collected (2014) more closely resembled a single-issue Eurosceptic party than a full-fledged populist radical right party (Arzheimer, 2015). However, already in the 2013 federal elections the newly formed AfD mainly attracted voters on the basis of opposition to immigration (Schmitt-Beck, 2017). In addition to a predominantly Eurosceptic message, the party also campaigned on opposition to multiculturalism and non-heteronormative lifestyles, leading Berbuir et al. (2015, p. 154) to argue that the party ‘can be regarded as a functional equivalent for a right-wing populist party in a country where right-wing politics are strongly stigmatised’.

2 The intended vote question is phrased as follows: ‘And if there were a general election tomorrow, which party would you vote for?’. Replacing the intended vote variable with a variable indicating which party a respondent actually voted for in the most recent national elections does not substantially change the reported results, speaking to their robustness. The EES data have been weighted using the included post-stratification weights (based on gender, age, urbanisation and region) in order to reduce sampling error and potential non-response bias. The results from unweighted data do not differ substantially from those reported here.

3 These congruence means are weighted by the inverted standard error of the mean voter position for each party, meaning that less weight is given to parties with fewer respondents and larger variance.

4 While this measurement is more in line with directional rather than proximity-based theories of voter behaviour (e.g. Rabinowitz, 1989), we view it here as a way of relaxing the assumptions made by the latter.

5 Vlaams Belang stands out as less Eurosceptical than the other parties, which may be related to its separatist agenda (cf. Laible, 2008) and the weak salience of the EU among Belgian parties, including VB (Van Hecke et al. 2012).

6 The British Conservatives, the second most conservative party in its sparsely populated party system, holds a neutral position on gay rights. In Belgium, all non-PRR parties in fact hold distinctly liberal positions on gay rights, which is attributed by Eeckhout and Paternotte (2011, p. 1077) to ‘an overall ethical “modernization process”’ triggered by the collapse of the Christian Democrats in the 1999 federal elections.

7 Voter positions and associated standard errors are shown in Table A2 in the appendix.

8 In a cross-check with the European Social Survey (2014), mean values for the variable ‘immigrants make country a better place to live’ (0–10) are correlated with the EES means (Table A2 in the appendix) at Pearson’s r = 0.44 if the FPÖ is excluded, and at −0.09 if it is included (for the eight PRR parties present in both surveys).

9 The largest change can be found on the EU issue, where it is primarily a result of the poor congruence of the Lega Nord.

10 While confidence interval overlap does not necessarily imply a null result (Schenker & Gentleman, 2001), the difference for immigration is in fact not significant at the 95% level if computed from the two point estimates and their standard errors (not shown here). Furthermore, most of the (insignificant) difference between the two – and the wide confidence intervals for the PRR parties – is driven by a single case, the Austrian FPÖ anomaly.

11 As a robustness check, we also estimate the linear effect of distance to the closest policy rival on party-voter congruence in Table A4 in the appendix. Controlling for issue and party differences, a one-point increase in the distance to the closest policy rival corresponds to about a 0.3 point increase in party-voter congruence (p = 0.010).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation [grant number MMW 2013.0010].