When do they put all of their eggs in one basket? past election result, issue salience, and the nicheness of radical right-wing parties

ABSTRACT

When do radical right-wing parties (RRPs) become more or less niche? In other words, when do they restrict their policy platform and emphasize their core issues (e.g. immigration) more or expand their policy platform incorporating other, particularly traditional socioeconomic issues? Using data on party manifestos and public opinion in Western Europe between 1980 and 2017, we find that in response to poor election results, the parties become more niche if the salience of their core issue (immigration) is high among party supporters, but become less niche if the salience is low. This result implies that if mainstream parties can influence the salience of particular issues, they can alter RRPs’ electoral strategy. The result also implies that RRPs will either maintain or even strengthen their niche party characteristics and compete primarily on immigration issues as long as immigration stays as a salient political issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Nicheness
• radical right-wing parties
• issue salience
• past election outcome

Notes

1 We conceptualize and measure nicheness following Meyer and Wagner (2013) and Meyer and Miller (2015) so that it indicates the extent to which a political party focuses certain policy areas compared with other political parties. Though Bischof (2017) updated their concept and measurement by proposing that different party families focus on different niche market segments, the two concepts become less dissimilar when we focus only on a particular party family (e.g. RRPs).

2 There are disagreements among scholars on how to define and classify RRPs. This article follows the definition and classification put forward by Mudde (2007) for two reasons. First, he conceptualizes RRPs by their ideological profile (rather than their ideological strength). Second, different from others who neglect how much RRPs focus on immigration issues, he explicitly and clearly acknowledges that immigration-related subjects of race, xenophobic, and multiculturalism are a primary focus of his RRPs (Mudde, 1996, 1999), while ‘the economic program is a secondary feature in the ideologies’ of the parties (Mudde, 2007, p. 119). This conceptualization of RRPs is consistent with a main characteristic of the parties that this article focuses on: RRPs, which focus exclusively on a few non-economic issues.

3 The overtime (within a party) variation of nicheness is as large as its cross-party variation. In our data of nicheness, while the standard deviation of the average nicheness scores of parties is 1.93 (cross-party variation), the average within-a-party standard deviation is 2.16 (overtime variation).

4 Though it is plausible that the increase of the degree of nicheness of RRPs is driven by their focusing more on issues other than immigration-related issues, the correlation between the nicheness change variable and the change of the party emphasis on immigration-related issues in our data is highly positive (r = 0.7099).

5 In our data of nicheness, while the average nicheness score of the MSI in the 1990s is 10.5, which is about one standard deviation smaller than the average nicheness score of all the parties/years in our data, that of the FPÖ is 15.2, which is about one standard deviation larger than the total average.

6 For example, the European Election Study 2004 and 2009 indicate that between 15 per cent (Sweden) to 42 per cent (Italy) of people who indicated immigration-related issues as the most important problem that their country faces pointed to a RRP as the best party that deals with the issues.

7 It does not necessarily mean that placing a great emphasis on immigration-related issues with their extreme positions always brings a reward to RRPs. It can strengthen their ‘pariah’ and ‘outsider’ image (van Spanje, 2010) and reduce the possibility of political cooperation between them and mainstream parties (van Spanje & van der Brug, 2009).

8 Thus, Han (2015) finds that mainstream, particularly left-wing, parties follow not the opinion of the general public but the opinion of their own supporters when they adjust their positions regarding immigration.

9 Studies provide slightly different concepts of niche party. While Adams et al. (2006) characterize niche parties as those with extreme ideologies, more recent studies define them as political parties that maintain a large degree of nicheness (Wagner, 2012a; Meyer & Miller, 2015). Though recent studies reject the idea of fixing a political party to either a mainstream or a niche party, most of them agree that ecology parties and RRPs are representative niche parties.

10 We are aware of the salience level of issues at the voter level being determined by the historical background as well as government policies and macroeconomic conditions. In addition, issue salience at the voter level is not just given for political parties: they may be able to manipulate the issue salience level at the voter level with their own strategies and campaigns. Though exploring the causes of issue salience is beyond the scope of this article, we also employ a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model to avoid a potential endogeneity problem. The discussion and the result of the analysis are found in the supplementary appendix.

11 The list of countries and RRPs is presented in the supplementary appendix (Table S1). Some major RRPs are excluded from the analysis because data are unavailable either in the Manifesto data (e.g. the British National Party) or in the Eurobarometer (e.g. the Swiss People’s Party).

12 This article utilizes the manifesto data in Volkens, Lehmann, Matthieβ, Merz, and Regel (2016) to measure how much parties emphasize each policy dimension. See the supplementary appendix for more information (Table S2).

13 The following studies are referred to for years in which each RRP was founded: Ignazi, 2003; Dinas, 2008; Luther, 2009; Arzheimer, 2015; Vossen, 2016.

14 However, Meyer and Wagner (2013) find that small parties are more prone to change their niche or mainstream party characteristics than big parties.

15 Questions on respondents’ attitudes toward the number of immigrants from less developed countries from the Eurobarometer, the European Value Study, and the European Social Survey are used to measure public opinion polarization. The question wordings are summarized in Table S4 in the supplementary appendix.

16 See Kittle and Winner (2005) for the strength and weakness of each model.

17 There can be a question on plausible collinearity between the two variables that construct the interaction terms: the vote share change and the salience level. For example, it might be true that the high salience level of a party’s core issue leads to its electoral success. We respond to this problem in two ways. First, theoretically, recent literature on the electoral success of these parties suggests that supply-side factors such as their ideological profile and their activists are more important determinants of their electoral outcomes than demand-side factors such as immigration level, economic conditions, and public opinion (Carter, 2005). Second, empirically, the correlation between these two variables is only negligible: −0.0317.

18 The horizontal axes of the graphs in Figure 1 range from the 10th percentile to the 90th percentile values of the vote share change and issue salience variables, respectively.

19 One control variable (party age) is statistically significant in multiple models. This is contrary to our expectation, but it is also argued that new (young) political parties should not frequently and substantially change their party programs in order to formulate and develop their own party identity (Lupu, 2013).

20 A comparison of the behavior of the FPÖ and the MSI illustrates that the party responses to electoral deficiency depend on the salience level of these parties’ core issues. While nativist arguments on immigration were accepted as legitimate and immigration-related issues were considered salient by the general public as well as by the supporters of RRPs in many Western European countries including Austria, the negative ideologies on immigration were unsuccessfully accepted by voters and mobilized by political parties in Italy due to the lack of legitimacy of the fascist ideology among the public (Veugelers & Chiarini, 2002).

21 We run the robustness check models in models 3 to 7 in Table 2 with the variable of the salience level among the general public (Table S5). The interaction term is statistically significant in some models, but not in all the models.

22 The salience score is constructed by adding all the variables that are related with immigration in the manifesto data (per607, per608, and per705).