Growth and Persistence of the Radical Right in Postindustrial Democracies: Advances and Challenges in Comparative Research

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Notes

1. As an example, see Cole's (2005) use of CMP to construct partisan competitive spaces in Austria, France, Italy and Germany. While the radical right-wing parties are in relatively plausible positions on the ‘new’ right as well as the ‘old’ right and also move over time in plausible ways, the same cannot be said for many conventional parties. In Austria, the People's party moves far to the left on economics between 1986 and 1996, if one follows CMP. In 1997, the French Gaullists are to the left of the Socialists on economics, and in Germany the liberal parties moved to the left on economics from 1987 to 1994!

2. For a review of expert judgments of party positions and content analysis of party manifestoes, see the special issue of Electoral Studies, 26:1 (2007).

3. Parties can avoid building a programmatic package if they can reward their voters through clientelistic targeted benefits (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007). But this is no longer an option for postindustrial democracies (Kitschelt 2007).

4. While demands for a block on admission and a repatriation of asylum seekers and the requirement for foreigners to adapt to Dutch culture topped the list of concerns among LPF voters, a rejection of efforts to reduce income differentials was also a significant predictor of the LPF vote in 2002 (see Van Holsteyn and Irwin 2003: 62).

5. It is for that same reason that de Figueiredo and Elkins (2003) found two entirely different opinion complexes in their comparative study of national identity. Separate from a radical rightist grid/group exclusionary nationalism, they identified mild ‘patriots’ expressing pride in their own country's democratic and social achievements, welfare state, and fairness in treating all societal groups. What they label patriotism really taps an economic-distributive position antagonistic to the radical right.

6. Contrary to Hug's (2001) admonition, I do not treat ‘entry’ of radical right-wing parties as a first stage that must be considered in accounts of radical right success to exclude selection bias. As Norris' (2005: 54–6) inventory of parties illustrates, the radical right is too ubiquitous among postindustrial democracies to expect an estimation bias when focusing on electoral success without a first-stage equation estimating party entry. By 2005, only Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Japan and the United States had no radical rightist parties, i.e. two tiny countries, two countries in which clientelistic electoral politics had more influence on voter–citizen relations than in just about any other affluent democracy (except Austria and Italy), and finally the United States with a system of comparatively incoherent parties (even in the partisan polarised 1990s!) that permitted radical right appeals to appear inside the Republican party in the guise of currents in the Christian right and populist presidential candidates (e.g., Patrick Buchanan).

7. Ignazi (2003: 208) claims that the rise of radical right-wing parties is preceded by a polarisation between conventional parties on economic left–right issues, with the conservatives moving to the market-liberal right. In many countries, however, even distinct rightward shifts of conservatives did not amount to a polarisation, as the effective positions of centre-left parties abandoned traditional leftist positions and also moved to the right to remain electorally successful, as I argued in a book on social democracy (Kitschelt 1994).

8. On the logic of discounting, see Adams et al. (2005: 23–6).

9. This argument is confirmed by Veugelers and Magnan (2005), but contradicted by Swank and Betz (2003), yet based on a statistical model that so much over-controls for large welfare states through other variables (proportional representation, left-libertarian party vote, established party vote long-term share, trade openness) that it is impossible to interpret the residual effect of the welfare state variable itself.

10. A similar result was confirmed in a more sophisticated quantitative analysis by Adams et al. (2006) for left and radical right niche parties. Parties at the outer periphery of party systems can maintain electoral support if they keep a minimum distance from conventional competitors and do not cater to preference shifts of the median voter.

11. In a new study of individual voters' propensity to support the radical right employing individual-level and contextual variables in a logit model, however, Arzheimer and Carter (2006: 433) also find that strategic party configuration does matter, here captured by a Grand Coalition dummy, the ideological position of the mainstream right, and the distance between major parties of the mainstream left and right on grid/group issues derived from the CMP data set.

12. The article also does not permit a careful scrutiny of her coding of party configurations or to assess whether the claimed relationship would be robust if the observations about France are dropped.

13. For a neat most-similar-systems comparative case study of Flanders and Wallonia, one with a successful radical right and the other with an unsuccessful one, confirming this result see Coffé (2005). In Wallonia, social democrats have maintained left–right polarisation on distributive economics to a greater extent than in Flanders.

14. Interestingly, the effect of this variable on the electoral fortunes of the radical right is very small and statistically insignificant, though in the correct direction (weaker anti-immigrant parties where their most important conventional competitors emphasise their core issues more). The weak statistical finding, however, could be due to measurement problems inherent in the Parties Manifesto Project (salience, not position).

15. I focus on vote share, not seat share. It certainly is not surprising that electoral systems have ‘mechanical effects’ that discriminate against small parties in the translation of votes into seats (Norris 2005: chapter 5). The critical challenge, however, is to explain why citizens support radical right-wing parties with their vote in the first place and sometimes in the face of dramatic disproportionality in the translation of votes into seats.

16. Cole (2005: 222), for example, does find that the German Republikaner was the one radical right-wing party in her study that did not embrace market-liberalism in the 1980s.

17. A step in the right direction is Cofféet al. (2007) who introduce some socio-economic controls to characterise the regions, albeit without including ecological variables that would capture the occupational profile of each unit and without individual-level data.

18. Depending on the occupational variables that indirectly track education as well, of course, an explicit education variable may drop out as a significant predictor of the radical right vote.

19. Ivarsflaten (2005: 481) shows that those workers and petty bourgeois who do vote for the radical right in Denmark are not far apart on the question of state involvement in the economy (both groups centre-right), while there is a substantial difference between workers and petty bourgeois supporting the radical right in France. She does not indicate, however, whether the FN-supporting working class is to the right of the left-voting working class on distributive issues.