Understanding and explaining populist radical right parties’ commitment to animal welfare in Western Europe

ABSTRACT

Populist radical right parties (PRRP) are considered to be supportive of domestic environmental protection. In this context, scholars stress the importance of animal welfare, arguing that nativist and authoritarian ideologies provide discursive links to the issue in multicultural Western societies. Others argue that the fascist origins of some European PRRP still manifest themselves in supportive positions on animal welfare. This study attempts to map PRRPs’ engagement and positions on animal welfare and to explain the differences within the party group. Using partly computer-assisted content analysis of PRRP election manifestos and Twitter campaigns in eight Western European countries, we find that PRRP are more committed to animal welfare than several other party families but vary considerably in their engagement and position on the issue. It is argued that the involvement depends on whether animal welfare is a prominent issue in the party system and whether PRRP have fascist roots.

KEYWORDS:

• Animal welfare
• populist radical right
• Western Europe
• fascism
• content analysis

Disclosure statement

The authors do not report any conflict of interest.

Biographical note

Jakob Schwörer is Policy Advisor at the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation in Stockholm. He was postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Political Science at the Leuphana University Lüneburg, visiting scholar at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-Rex) at Oslo University, at the Department of Government at Uppsala University and at San Francisco University in Quito. His research focuses on party behaviour, populist, nativist, religious and environmental communication of political actors in a comparative perspective.

Belén Fernández-García is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Granada. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Amsterdam, Sciences Po Paris, the University of Lisbon and the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. Her principal research interests lie in the area of political parties, populism and radical right.

Data availability statement

Data are available on request.

Ethics approval statement

The research is in line with the journals’ ethical standards.

Permission to reproduce material from other sources

No permissions for other sources were needed.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2023.2293435

Notes

1. Only the French Reconquête has not yet been evaluated due to its novelty. Yet, in the literature there is no doubt about its nativist and populist orientation (Ivaldi 2022, Mayer 2022).

2. We further included the Green-Left party in Italy with 3.63% of the votes.

3. Sample of 50% coded and 50% non-coded units.

4. Information on the time periods and polling institutes can be found in the online appendix.

5. ((salience party a * votes party)+(salience party b * votes party b)+(salience party c * votes party c)+(…))/(votes party a+b+c+(…)).

6. Out of a total of 134,181 tweets, 1,035 tweets contain content in favour of animal welfare and 45 tweets are against animal welfare. Among PRRP, we found 168 pro-animal welfare tweets and 34 anti-animal welfare tweets (out of 46,228).

7. For all Austrian parties we only considered the candidates‘ profiles.

8. Salient cases are: FPÖ = 3.54; UKIP = 1.32; FdI = 0.62; Lega = 0.57; RN = 0.48. Cases without salient animal welfare discourse: Chega = 0.37; AfD = 0.35; R = 0.22; SVP = 0.21; Vox = 0.

9. Parties within party systems with animal-welfare agenda: UKIP = 0.78; R = 0.63; Lega = 0.62; RN = 0.59; SVP = 0.59. Parties within party systems without animal-welfare agenda: AfD = 0.45; FPÖ = 0.38; Chega = 0.24; Vox = 0.21.

10. Parties acting within a party system with relevant green parties: AfD = 19.85; SVP = 10.32; FPÖ = 10.01; R/RN = 5.93. No relevant green party: FdI/Lega = 3.6; Chega = 3; UKIP = 2.7; Vox = 2.4.

11. http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~cragin/fsQCA/software.shtml.

12. We consider a Green party to be relevant (to put pressure on PRRPs) if it usually wins at least 4% in national elections (taking into account the last three general elections). In Portugal, the Green Party gets more than 4% in national elections, but only in coalition with the much more popular Communist Party (CDU).

13. The case of the Sweden Democrats emphasising animal welfare (Backlund and Jungar 2022) supports our conclusion, since the party had links to extremist and neo-Nazi organizations in their early days (Rydgren and van der Meiden 2019).

Additional information

Funding

The authors do not report any funding.