Abstract
How can centre–right parties in majoritarian systems adapt to threats from the radical right? Using a long-term inter-election panel study, we identify a remarkably stable constituency of support for Britain’s recent radical-right parties – the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party. We show also how these same voters defected from the Conservatives across elections. In response, the government used a combination of the election of a new leader, Boris Johnson, and a hardline position on Brexit to reincorporate these voters into its support base, helping to lead to a large Conservative majority in 2019. Cross-party evaluations of Johnson were even more important in influencing this success than the issue of Brexit itself. Effective centre–right adaption to radical-right challenges is not simply about strategic issue positioning, it can also derive from centre–right leaders with populist appeal.
Highlights
The rise of a radical-right constituency of voters has impacted substantially on European political systems in recent decades
How can centre–right parties in majoritarian systems adapt to threats from the radical right? Using a long-term inter-election panel study, we identify a remarkably stable constituency of support for Britain’s recent radical-right parties – the UK Independence Party and the Brexit Party
While scholarship on mainstream party responses to the radical-right parties and voters has typically focused on strategic policy shifts, we show how the Conservative Party appealed to these voters over time through positioning on Brexit, and through the election of a charismatic leader with populist appeal, thereby providing a novel insight into the conditions that enable effective centre–right competition with radical-right challengers
Summary
The rise of a radical-right constituency of voters has impacted substantially on European political systems in recent decades. The first empirical issue we address is whether the 2019 Brexit Party was UKIP 2014 revisited – a radical-right party representing views that had been excluded from the political mainstream – or whether there were important differences in the two parties’ support bases and appeal to voters.
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