Responding to far right challengers: does accommodation pay off?^*

* Upon publication, the data will made available on the authors’ websites.

ABSTRACT

Right-wing populist and far right parties are on the rise across Europe. While established parties are suffering dramatic electoral losses, right-wing parties are celebrating one electoral victory after another. To address their radical right challengers, many established parties have adopted a so-called ‘accommodative strategy’ by taking a more immigration-skeptical policy position. However, it is unclear whether such a strategy yields the expected benefits or whether such a position shift in turn hurts a party electorally. In this article, we find that mainstream left parties benefit from ‘going tough on immigration’ whereas it neither helps nor hurts mainstream right parties electorally. We arrive at this conclusion through an analysis of 16,811 vote choices in 15 elections in six countries from 1998 until 2013. Our findings have important implications for understanding what explains the rise of far right parties and the changing nature of electoral competition across Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Accommodation strategy
• vote switching
• far right
• immigration

Acknowledgement

The authors follow the principle of rotation. Both authors have contributed equally to all work. We thank Christina Hecht and Jochen Rehmert for excellent research assistance. We are moreover grateful for valuable comments and suggestions from Sara Hobolt, Toni Rodon, the other authors of this special issue and the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Jae-Jae Spoon is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on party competition, small parties and coalition governments in Europe. Her work has been published in Comparative Political Studies, the British Journal of Political Science, the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics, Party Politics and by the University of Michigan Press.

Heike Klüver is Professor of Comparative Political Behavior at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests include interest groups, political parties, coalition governments, legislative politics and quantitative text analysis. She has published her work among others with Oxford University Press, in the American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, European Union Politics, European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics and the Journal of European Public Policy.

ORCID

Heike Klüver http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4838-0754

Notes

* Upon publication, the data will made available on the authors’ websites.

1 Jean Marie Le Pen, founder of the French Front National, has famously said that voters ‘prefer the original to the copy’.

2 We do not differentiate whether voters have supported a different non-far right party at the current election as compared to the last election. As long as voters support one of the non-far right parties, we coded vote switching as 0.

3 ‘per’ stands for percentage of quasi-sentences in an election manifesto that are devoted to a given category.

4 In addition, we have estimated an additional robustness check in which we weight the positions of the remaining parties with their seat share in the previous legislative term (see table A.3 in the appendix). The results are substantially the same.

5 Since we only analyze 15 elections, the number of second level units is not sufficient for a multilevel analysis (Stegmueller 2013). However, to test the robustness of the findings, we have also estimated an additional multilevel logistic regression model. The results are substantially the same. In addition, we have run a rare events logit model given the low number of switchers in our analysis. The results are similar.

6 The result is similar when we only include voters who previously supported a Conservative or Christian democratic party.

7 See e.g., https://www.sahra-wagenknecht.de/de/article/2713.offene-grenzen-f%C3%BCr-alle-das-ist-weltfremd.html, last accessed on 20 August 2018.

8 Note, however, that preliminary survey evidence suggests that the social democrats were not able to win many voters from the DPP. The Social democrats instead seem to have been able to keep their own voters while many of their sister parties across Europe lost their core electoral base to other parties.

9 We also examined the interaction between an anti-immigration party position shift and a voter’s immigration preference (see appendix table A.2). We find that the effect of a party policy position shift towards a more immigration-critical position is conditioned by the policy position of voters. More specifically, the probability that voters switch to a far right party decreases as parties adopt a more immigration-critical policy position when voters are skeptical of immigration. However, upon further examination of the marginal effect of adopting a more immigration-critical position as voter immigration preferences vary (0 = pro-immigration, 10 = anti-immigration), we find somewhat unusual results, as Figure A.3 demonstrates. While the overall result shows that as voters become more immigration skeptical, a party’s move to the right decreases the probability of switching to the far right, voters who are more supportive of immigration are in fact more likely to switch than those who are less supportive. This could be explained by the low number of switchers in the dataset (less than 4%), but should be explored further in future research.