![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Democracy is under threat today and scholars agree that the main challenge is not sudden regime breakdown, but rather the gradual erosion of key institutions and norms because of growing public support to political forces with illiberal tendencies. In the case of Western Europe, the major threat comes from the populist radical right. Although it is true that the latter has been gaining votes in Western Europe, scholars have not analysed the extent to which a sizeable share of the electorate dislikes this party family. Nevertheless, recent studies reveal that it is important to consider both those who feel close to and those who reject political parties, i.e. positive and negative partisanship. To address this research gap, in this contribution we rely on original survey data for 10 Western European countries to examine negative partisanship towards the populist radical right. The empirical analysis reveals that a large section of the Western European electorate has an aversion to this party family and this finding should be seen as an important sign of democratic resilience. In fact, those who dislike the populist radical right are strong supporters of both democracy per se and the liberal democratic regime.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe; Mudde, “The Populist Radical Right”; Mudde, “Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe”.
2 Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, Populism.
3 See introduction to this special issue, Lührmann and Merkel.
4 Mudde, The Far Right Today; Rydgren, The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right; Wodak The Politics of Fear.
5 Dennison and Geddes, “A Rising Tide?”.
6 Harteveld and Ivarsflaten, “Why Women Avoid the Radical Right”.
7 Gidron and Hall, “The Politics of Social Status”; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Studying Populism in Comparative Perspective”; Rydgren, Class Politics and the Radical Right Right.
8 Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Political Identities”.
9 Abramowitz and Webster, “The Rise of Negative Partisanship and Nationalization”; Abramowitz and Webster, “Negative Partisanship”; Medeiros and Noel, “The Forgotten Side of Partisanship”; Bankert, “Negative and Positive Partisanship”.
10 Iyengar, Lelkes, Levendysky, Malhotra, and Westwood, “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization”.
11 Samuels and Zucco, Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans.
12 A notable exceptions is Mayer “How Negative Partisanship Affects Voting Behavior in Europe”.
13 Rovira Kaltwasser, Vehrkamp and Wratil, Europe’s Choice.
14 Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe.
15 Bale and Rovira Kaltwasser, Riding the Populist Wave.
16 Mudde, The Far Right Today; Rydgren, The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right; Wodak, The Politics of Fear.
17 Akkerman, De Lange and Rooduijn, Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties;
18 A list of the parties included can be found in the appendix. The electoral data for the parties was collected from the ParlGov database (www.parlogov.org) and the European Journal of Political Research (ECPR) Political Data Yearbook.
19 Rydgren, The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right.
20 Mayer, “The Radical Right in France”.
21 Harteveld and Ivarsflaten, “Why Women Avoid the Radical Right”; Ivarsflaten, Blinder and Bjånesøy, “How and Why the Populist Radical Right Persuades Citizens”.
22 Medeiros and Noel, “The Forgotten Side of Partisanship”; Samuels and Zucco, Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans.
23 Baumeister et al., “Bad is Stronger than Good”.
24 Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Political Identities”.
25 Medeiros and Noel, “The Forgotten Side of Partisanship”; Caruana et al., “The Power of the Dark Side”.
26 Zhon et al., “Negational Categorization and Intergroup Behavior”.
27 Huddy, “From Social to Political Identity”.
28 Huddy et al. “Expressive Partisanship”.
29 Bankert, “Negative and Positive Partisanship”.
30 Brewer, “The Psychology of Prejudice”.
31 Caruana et al., “The Power of the Dark Side”.
32 Mayer, “Howe Negative Partisanship Affects Voting Behavior in Europe”, 3.
33 Mayer, “How Negative Partisanship Affects Voting Behavior”, 2.
34 Abramowitz and Webster, “The Rise of Negative Partisanship and Nationalization”; Abramowitz and Webster, “Negative Partisanship”; Iyengar et al., “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization.”
35 Caruana et al., “The Power of the Dark Side”; Medeiros and Noel, “The Forgotten Side of Partisanship”.
36 Two notable exceptions are the work of Mayer, “How Negative Partisanship Affects Voting Behavior”, and Spoon and Kanthak, “He’s not my Prime Minister!”.
37 More details about the survey data can be found in Rovira Kaltwasser, Vehrkamp and Wratil, Europe’s Choice.
38 We are aware of the limitations of measuring party identifications in one point in time in order to tackle its temporal stability. However, previous research on negative partisanship by party families in Europe shows similar percentages of partisans’ support and dislikes. See Mayer, “How Negative Partisanship Affects Voting Behavior”.
39 Rose and Mishler, “Negative and Positive Party Identification”; Samuels and Zucco, Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans.
40 Richardson, “European Party Loyalties Revisited.”
41 Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Political Identities”.
42 Bankert, “Negative and Positive Partisanship”.
43 To test this argument in detail, one would need longitudinal data, which unfortunately does not exist for Western Europe. However, it is not far-fetched to suggest that the more radical a political party becomes, the more polarization generates, thereby fostering positive and negative feelings that are not short-lived but rather enduring. Seen in this light, if PRR parties in Western Europe continue to radicalize, this can certainly reinforce negative partisanship against them.
44 We provide a list of the political parties included in each of these party families in Annex A, see supplemental data. It is worth noting that the survey data we use in this paper is for ten Western European countries, including the case of Greece, where one can find an extreme right party: Golden Dawn. We are aware that the academic literature makes the distinction between populist radical right parties and extreme right parties: while the former are nominally democratic, the latter are openly undemocratic. Nevertheless, we decided to include the case of Golden Dawn in our analysis of positive and negative partisanship towards the PRR, since this permit us to consider the Greek case study and therefore bring more variety to the research design.
45 Mayer, “How Negative Partisanship Affects Voting Behavior”; Caruana et al., “The Power of the Dark Side”.
46 Rose and Mishler, “Negative and Positive Party Identification,” 230–1.
47 Boese et al., “How Democracies Prevail”.
48 Van Hauwaert and van Kessel, “Beyond Protest and Discontent”.
49 We performed factorial analysis in order to build the corresponding indexes. We proceeded with orthogonal varimax rotation method. In the Populist Index, all items load heavily on the coalescing factor. The State/Market Index originally included 5 items, after factor analysis we dropped one item. The Conservative/Liberal Index originally included 5 items, and after factor analysis we dropped two items. The Immigration Index maintained their original item-compositions. The item-composition of the Populist Index and Immigration Index are based theoretically based on previous research (e.g. Meléndez and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Political identities”, van Hauwaert and van Kessel, “Beyond protest and discontent”). State/Market and Conservative/Liberal indexes were modified empirically according to factor analysis results. We considered it appropriate to proceed by an exploratory technique in the latter cases, since the literature has employed diverse measurements to capture left-right preferences in economic and socio-cultural realms. For a detailed analysis of the items included in this ideological profile, see Annex A, see supplemental data.
50 Ferrín and Kriesi, How Europeans View and Evaluate Democracy.
51 We performed factorial analysis – orthogonal varimax rotation method – in order to build the corresponding indexes. All indexes kept their original item-composition. For a detailed analysis of the items included in this democratic profile, see Annex A, see supplemental data.
52 For fixed-effects models we arbitrarily took Spain as the reference case in order to control for potential country effects.
53 Ivarsflaten, “What Unites Right-wing Populists in Western Europe?”; Mudde, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe; Mudde, “Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties”; Oesch, “Explaining Workers’ Support”; van Hauwaert and van Kessel, “Beyond Protest and Discontent”.
54 Akkerman, De Lange and Rooduijn, Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe; Häusermann, Picot and Geering, “Rethinking Party Politics and the Welfare State”; Schumacher and Van Kersbergen, “Do Mainstream Parties Adapt”.
55 Gidron and Hall, “The Politics of Social Status”; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, “Studying Populism in Comparative Perspective”; Rooduijn and Burgoon, “The Paradox of Well-being”.
56 Dahlberg, Linde and Holmberg, “Democratic Discontent in Old and New Democracies”; Norris, Democratic Deficit.
57 Mudde, “The Populist Radical Right”; Mudde, “Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe”.
58 Immerzeel and Pickup, “Populist Radical Right Parties Mobilizing ‘the People’?”.
59 Since 1979 turnout for the European Parliament elections has been steadily dropping, going from almost 62% in that year, down to a historic low of 42.6% in 2014. For more details on this, see Rovira Kaltwasser, Vehrkamp and Wratil, Europe’s Choice, 8–9.
60 It is worth indicating that previous research has shown that results on questions about declared participation in elections tend to be inflated because of social desirability bias. This problem might be probably stronger for those with negative partisanship towards the PRR than for those with positive partisanship towards the PRR, since the latter do a have clear electoral preference (i.e. voting for the PRR), while the former have many different electoral preferences (i.e. voting for any party besides the PRR, including the option of abstaining or casting a blank/null vote). For more information about the social desirability bias in measuring turnout via surveys, see Jeffrey A. Karp and David Brockington, “Social Desirability and Response Validity”, as well as, Allyson L. Hoolbrook and Jon A. Krosnick, “Social Desirability Bias in Voter Turnout Reports”.
61 Harteveld and Ivarsflaten, “Why Women Avoid the Radical Right”; Ivarsflaten, Blinder and Bjånesøy, “How and Why the Populist Radical Right Persuades Citizens”.
62 Caramani and Manucci, “National Past and Populism”.
63 Mudde, The Far Right Today.
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Carlos Meléndez
Carlos Meléndez is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and Associate Researcher at Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales - Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile.
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is Professor of Political Science at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile and Associate Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES). He is the co-author, with Cas Mudde, of Populism a Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017) as well as the co-editor, with Tim Bale, of Riding the Populist Wave. Europe's Mainstream Right in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2021).