https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6597-6459
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ABSTRACT
The aim of this research is to identify the different electoral scenarios of success for anti-establishment political parties in Western Europe. To this end, a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis has been carried out in 26 national elections of European countries held between 2010 and 2015. Hypotheses from the demand side and supply side have been tested. Results suggest that high levels of dissatisfaction with the performance of democracy and the state of the economy, distrust towards parties and politicians, as well as the presence of ‘coaligence’ (coalitions and convergence) in proportional electoral contexts, are favourable scenarios to these political parties. These results are coherent with some arguments found in the literature that state how anti-establishment actors present themselves as the only truly democratic actors and the only real political alternative.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. High levels of perceived corruption were also explored in the pre-test as a favourable scenario and the QCA solutions were the same as those presented in this latest version. It suggests that distrust in parties and politicians is a more generalised scenario, since in these attitudes can contribute not only corruption but also other factors (e.g. cartelisation of parties).
2. We also check the profile of the electorate of the selected anti-establishment parties and all of them showed less external political efficacy than the national average, expressed by the disagreement with the statements: ‘Politicians care what people think’, ‘Political systems allow people to have influence on politics’ and ‘Political systems allow people to have a say in what government does’ (ESS7).
3. In case of more than one anti-establishment party, the outcome was measured by the sum of the electoral results of all of them.
4. Our criterion coincides with Hanley and Sikk’s (2014) who also took the election as unit of analysis.
5. Comparative studies also have shown that these attitudes do not explain the success of Western Europe anti-establishment parties in comparative terms (Van Kessel 2015; Norris 2005).
6. We used the standard Eurobarometer for Greece.
7. We used the standard Eurobarometer for Greece.
8. Cronbach’s Alpha >0.8.
9. We used the standard Eurobarometer for Greece.
10. We will refer to the combination of coalition and convergence (either de facto or ideological convergence between elections) as ‘coaligence’.
11. The closest cases are FRA2012 and SPA2011. We explored in the pre-test their inclusion as ‘more out than in’ (0.33) cases and the results were the same.
12. 2005–2015.
14. The consistency establishes whether the combination of conditions is a subset of the outcome (X ≤ Y), or not.
15. ‘Coverage’ measures how much of the outcome is explained by each solution term and by the solution as a whole (Ragin 2008, 85).
16. Consistency: 0.851830; coverage: 0.892814.
17. Consistency: 0.868207; coverage: 0.667015.
18. Consistency: 0.799772; coverage: 0.73382.
19. The CHES2014 shows medium-low scores in anti-elitism (6.9 and 6.6, respectively), at similar levels to other parties not considered as anti-establishment (e.g. Ciudadanos). The anti-elitism does not form part of the main issues of these parties either: those are immigration, taxes and EU in the case of the DF (CHES2014) and taxation, immigration and welfare in the FrP (e.g. Jupskås 2015).