Political (In)tolerance of the Far-Right: The Importance of Agency

Lise Bjånesøy

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.655204

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of far-right agency on public political tolerance—what the parties on the far right do to disconnect themselves from accusations of extremism and thus increase their political tolerance by the public. Examining such patterns is challenging because of the multiple varieties of party attributes and strategies that are used by the far right. This paper uses a conjoint survey experiment conducted in the Norwegian Citizen Panel. Each respondent was presented with one vignette describing important attributes of a hypothetical far-right initiative and was then asked to evaluate whether this initiative should be allowed to hold an event. The conjoint design makes it possible to test the impact of the ideological and organizational varieties of the far right. The results demonstrate that what the parties on the far right do is crucial for public political tolerance. Denying extremism and excluding extreme members increase tolerance. However, the features that the far right is not in control of, such as its ideological legacy and the fact that some of its members have been convicted of racist speech negatively affect public political tolerance. The paper concludes that the agency of the far right is a necessary but not sufficient condition for public political tolerance of the far right.

Highlights

The far right has achieved substantial electoral success over the past few decades
It moves on to consider the independent factors related to the far right, as these are used and representativeness is available in the Norwegian Citizen Panel methodology reports (Skjervheim et al, 2018). 9An example of how the experiment looked to the respondents can be found in the Supplementary Material
Public political tolerance of the far right is examined through the lens of agency—what the parties on the far right do to disconnect themselves from accusations of extremism and increase their political tolerance on the part of the public

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The far right has achieved substantial electoral success over the past few decades. With the rise of far-right political parties, several scholarly debates have followed. The experiment used in this study tests whether such connections as well as explicit distancing from such connections to Europe’s Nazi past contribute to public political tolerance of the far right, and whether such attributes make the voters perceive the far right as a threat to democracy. The logic behind investigating the attributes of the far right rather than far-right target groups is that, when varying target groups, we cannot know exactly what features of a particular party contribute to public political tolerance This experiment combines the findings from previous studies into an experimental design that is able to test multiple factors simultaneously. Robust clustered standard errors at the respondent level are used in the analysis

RESULTS

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

ETHICS STATEMENT