Radical Right-wing Parties Research Articles

A Radical Right-Wing Failure in Canada

This article is a quantitative investigation into why Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party of Canada (PPC), a radical right-wing party (RRP), failed to succeed in the 2019 Canadian federal election. Canada has not witnessed the electoral breakthrough of such a party. I argue the failure of the PPC was the result of a mixture of the stabilization of immigrant inflows and the softening of anti-immigrant sentiment. More favourable conditions for the PPC, including extensive media coverage and increasing support for populist and mildly authoritarian sentiment, may have been necessary, but were not sufficient alone to allow for an RRP breakthrough. RRPs are unlikely to succeed in Canada as long as the immigration rate remains predictable and Canadians continue to hold favourable views towards immigrants.

Climate Change Denial among Radical Right-Wing Supporters

Political right-wing orientation correlates with climate change denial in several Western countries. Politicians and voters of far-right (i.e., radical and extreme right-wing) parties seem to be particularly inclined to dismiss climate change but the reason for this is unclear. Thus, the present paper investigates if and why climate change denial is more common among voters of the radical right-wing party Sweden Democrats as compared to voters of a mainstream right-wing party (the Conservative Party, Moderaterna), and compares both these voter groups with center-left (Social Democrat) voters. In four regression analyses, distrust of public service media (Swedish Television, SVT), socioeconomic right-wing attitudes, and negative attitudes toward feminism and women were the strongest predictors of climate change denial. These variables outperformed conservative ideologies (Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation), anti-immigration attitudes, distrust of the Parliament and courts, and belief in conspiracies, in predicting denial. Party preferences explained only a small or zero part of variance in denial over and above these variables. The results suggest that even though radical and mainstream right-wing parties emphasize different sociopolitical issues and anti-establishment messages, similar psychological factors seem to explain why these voter groups differ from each other and from left-wing voters in climate change denial. However, the included independent variables were intercorrelated, which calls into question to what degree they can be separated when explaining psychological underpinnings of climate change denial.

Climate Change Denial among Radical Right-Wing Supporters

The linkage between political right-wing orientation and climate change denial is extensively studied. However, previous research has almost exclusively focused on the mainstream right, which differs from the far right (radical and extreme) in some important domains. Thus, we investigated correlates of climate change denial among supporters of a radical right-wing party (Sweden Democrats, N = 2216), a mainstream right-wing party (the Conservative Party, Moderaterna, N = 634), and a mainstream center-left party (Social Democrats, N = 548) in Sweden. Across the analyses, distrust of public service media (Swedish Television, SVT), socioeconomic right-wing attitudes, and antifeminist attitudes outperformed the effects of anti-immigration attitudes and political distrust in explaining climate change denial, perhaps because of a lesser distinguishing capability of the latter mentioned variables. For example, virtually all Sweden Democrat supporters oppose immigration. Furthermore, the effects of party support, conservative ideologies, and belief in conspiracies were relatively weak, and vanished or substantially weakened in the full models. Our results suggest that socioeconomic attitudes (characteristic for the mainstream right) and exclusionary sociocultural attitudes and institutional distrust (characteristic for the contemporary European radical right) are important predictors of climate change denial, and more important than party support per se.

Radical right parties and anti-feminist speech on Instagram: Vox and the 2019 Spanish general election

Radical right-wing parties often use the attack on feminism as a central argument in their political discourse. The Spanish political party Vox, born in 2013, is a good example of this phenomenon. This paper analyzes Vox’s Instagram posts for the party’s two last electoral campaigns previous to the two successive general elections held in Spain in 2019. After the collection, selection and quantification of these data, we carried out a qualitative analysis of the semantic networks created through the utilization of images, videos, texts, interactions, hashtags and emojis. Our findings identify five fundamental arguments: classic gender nationalism, anti-Muslim gender nationalism, delegitimization and ridicule of feminism, discrediting the concept of gender, and the idea that Vox is, in fact, the party that most advocates for women. An outstanding discursive strategy used throughout the sample is that of contrast and association. Signifiers with a strong positive signified and broad social acceptance (euphoric terms) are associated with this party and its political positions. In contrast, negatively charged signifiers and hate-instigating terms (dysphoric) are associated with feminism and the so-called “gender ideology.”

Two-bloc Logic, Polarisation and Coalition Government: The November 2019 General Election in Spain

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the role played by polarisation in the Spanish party system. It first analyses the failure in the attempts to form a government after the 28 April 2019 general election in Spain. It shows how polarisation and short-term calculations made government formation impossible and led to a new general election in November that year. The article also describes how prior to the electoral campaign, the exhumation of Francisco Franco’s body and the riots in Catalonia, which added to the saliency of territorial conflict, fostered votes for the radical right-wing party Vox. It will also be shown how the election results led to a fragmented and more polarised Congress. Finally, the article discusses the formation of the first minority coalition government in the recent democratic history of Spain – one made up of the PSOE and UP – its structure and its potential implications for the Spanish party system.

Contextual explanations of radical right-wing party support in Sweden: a multilevel analysis

ABSTRACT With the aim of studying the role of contextual factors for explaining within-country variation in the vote share of the radical right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats, in the 2014 Swedish election, we specify and test hypotheses pertaining to social marginality, ethnic threat, the contact hypothesis, and the halo effect. We study the variation in the electoral share of the Sweden Democrats at two different levels simultaneously by performing multilevel analyses to account for the ways in which voting districts are clustered within municipalities. The main finding from our analyses is the support for the ethnic threat hypothesis, where the vote share of the Sweden Democrats is significantly higher in those areas that have seen an increase in the foreign-born population, and to some extent also in ethnically diverse areas, contradicting previous research on ethnic minority presence in fine-grained contexts. The expectation that the vote share for the Sweden Democrats should be higher in socioeconomic marginalized districts is partly supported, but we find no evidence of a halo effect, where ethnically homogeneous areas that are geographically close to heterogeneous districts were expected to have a higher vote share for the Sweden Democrats.

Social policy outcomes of government participation by radical right parties

The literature has pointed to a change in radical right-wing parties’ (RRWPs) position regarding the welfare state. Those parties have abandoned the neoliberal approach on distributive issues and have become defenders of social expenditure for deserving groups. Nevertheless, as RRWPs have joined with right-wing mainstream parties to form governments, their distributive policy position might cause conflict in a coalition. This study, therefore, addresses this puzzle by analysing the social policy outcomes of RRWPs’ government participation. The conclusion is that those parties contribute to the welfare state retrenchment. However, policies are not affected evenly. Expenditure that targets groups regarded as undeserving by the radical right is retrenched the most.

Explaining the emergence of the radical right in Spain and Portugal: salience, stigma and supply

Spain and Portugal have long been considered exceptions when it comes to the electoral success of radical right-wing parties in Europe. This scenario changed for both countries in 2019, with the extraordinary rise of Vox in Spain and the comparatively more modest election of one representative of Chega in Portugal. Their emergence – and the stark difference in the extents of their success – provides researchers with an ideal ‘edge-case’ and can be explained via a theoretical model that builds on and fuses previous explanatory models for radical right success. The Iberian cases demonstrate that radical right parties succeed when they (i) avoid the stigma of extremism, (ii) benefit from a gap in political supply on the right and (iii) cater to an unsatiated demand of voters on a salient sociocultural issue. While both countries had long been home to marginal far-right political forces, the stigma of extremism prevented them from being considered credible political alternatives. The appearance of new parties that emerged as a result of splits from the mainstream centre-right, in both cases reflecting a beleaguered political supply, gave the radical right an opportunity to avoid stigma, as we demonstrate through a news content analysis. However, whereas in Spain Vox could profit from both the Catalan independence challenge and the uptick in salience of immigration, which had previously been anomalously low in Iberia, Chega has not (yet) benefited from a similarly ripe political opportunity structure in Portugal.

The Multiple Spanish Elections of April and May 2019: The Impact of Territorial and Left-right Polarisation

ABSTRACT This article analyses the 2019 local, regional, European and April general elections in Spain. The constitutional crisis in Catalonia in 2017, the motion of no-confidence leading to the new Socialist government and the emergence of a radical right-wing party, VOX, all led to Spanish politics becoming more polarised. This paper also discusses polarisation from both the left-right and the territorial perspectives, intimately linked in Spain both for historical reasons but also because of agency decisions during the period analysed. Finally, the article shows the electoral results, government formation processes and political implications of polarisation in a non-institutionalised party system.

Many losers – One winner? An examination of vote switching to the AfD in the 2017 German federal election using VAA data

The German federal election of 2017 saw significant losses for the two German mainstream parties (Volksparteien) and governing coalition partners, the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD). The major beneficiary was the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-populist party, which almost tripled its amount of votes received from the 2013 federal election. Making use of data from a Voting Advice Application, this article seeks to explore the AfD’s extraordinary electoral success with particular attention to the party’s capacity to attract voters from the two mainstream and traditionally powerful parties. Drawing on the literature on radical right-wing parties in Europe and tracking the route of AfD from a single-issue Eurosceptic party to a radical party with broader programmatic appeal, this work tests hypotheses regarding demographic, political and attitudinal determinants of voting for AfD, in general, and switching one’s vote to AfD from CDU/CSU or SPD more specifically. In line with previous literature, individual-level analyses show that voting for the AfD seems to be more tangentially related to demographic variables, such as sex, age and education and more strongly connected to political concerns, e.g. “conservative” self-placement and attitudes toward specific policies, immigration and Euroscepticism in particular.

New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages. An Introduction

New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages, a seminar organised by Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub, the University of Wrocław and the Lower Silesian University, on 25–27 September 2017, inquired into the problem of the rise of right-wing populism in Central Europe. Manifest in responses to the refugee crisis of 2015 and to the Brexit referendum in 2016 across Europe, the populists successfully mobilised constituencies with anti-EU and anti-immigration sentiments. These attitudes, in turn, stimulated the emergence of nationalist agendas on an unexpected scale, moving radical right-wing parties with a pronounced nationalist programme from the margins, much closer to real political power. As part of the Relocating Central Europe seminar series, our reflection focused on that region, attempting to answer fundamental questions about the sources, purposes and modes of operation of the new nationalist impetus in political programmes, including those fostered at government level.

Legacies of the Third Reich: Concentration Camps and Out-group Intolerance

We explore the long-term political consequences of the Third Reich and show that current political intolerance, xenophobia, and voting for radical right-wing parties are associated with proximity to former Nazi concentration camps in Germany. This relationship is not explained by contemporary attitudes, the location of the camps, geographic sorting, the economic impact of the camps, or their current use. We argue that cognitive dissonance led those more directly exposed to Nazi institutions to conform with the belief system of the regime. These attitudes were then transmitted across generations. The evidence provided here contributes both to our understanding of the legacies of historical institutions and the sources of political intolerance.

Portugal - The 2019 I·CONnect-Clough Center Global Review of Constitutional Law

2019 was a year marked by political change and social contestation. On the political quadrant, we saw the end of the highly publicized “geringonca”, due to the lack of consensus between the Socialist Party and its previous left-wing allies. We now have a minority left-wing Government that will have to seek the support of other parties when necessary. The Portuguese Parliament also became more fragmented in the 2019 legislative elections, with the election of Parliament Members by parties that, until then, had not achieved representation (in particular, a radical right-wing party was able, for the first time in our democracy, to elect one Member of Parliament). The social field was also very active, with the summoning of several strikes in different professional sectors. The strikes of the drivers of dangerous goods transport vehicles were particularly felt, which led the Government to invoke emergency powers. But discontent was also very acute among health professionals, teachers, and even policemen. And since the Government did not correspond to their demands, this scenario is likely to repeat itself in the next year. For its part, the Constitutional jurisprudence focused, once again, on the matter of family rights (revisiting its landmark decision on surrogacy, but also its previous rulings on paternity proceedings), while reaffirming the right to citizenship, the right to personality development, as well as the right the privacy and to the protection of communications.

Introduction

Introduction

The Baskerville's dog suddenly started barking: voting for VOX in the 2019 Spanish general elections

ABSTRACT The electoral success of the new populist radical right-wing party, VOX, which achieved an unprecedent electoral result in the Spanish general elections of April 2019, brought an end to Spain's exceptional status as a country free of the radical right. This article asks: who votes for VOX? Empirically, we present the first assessment of electoral support for VOX at the national level. Relying on national post-electoral survey data, our results show that the electoral profile of VOX's supporters differs from that of populist radical right-wing parties from the rest of Europe. Support for VOX, much like the voters of their European contemporaries, tends to be markedly higher amongst males; economic status, however, has the reverse effect than that observed elsewhere on the continent, with individuals on the higher end of the income distribution more likely to have voted for VOX in the April 2019 general elections. Importantly, we establish that national identity plays a large role in explaining support for the new radical right-wing challenger and that the effect of identity is conditioned by negative evaluations of the political situation in Spain.

Inferring the dynamics of rising radical right-wing party support using Gaussian processes.

The use of classical regression techniques in social science can prevent the discovery of complex, nonlinear mechanisms and often relies too heavily on both the expertise and prior expectations of the data analyst. In this paper, we present a regression methodology that combines the interpretability of traditional, well used, statistical methods with the full predictability and flexibility of Bayesian statistics techniques. Our modelling approach allows us to find and explain the mechanisms behind the rise of Radical Right-wing Populist parties (RRPs) that we would have been unable to find using traditional methods. Using Swedish municipality-level data (2002-2018), we find no evidence that the proportion of foreign-born residents is predictive of increases in RRP support. Instead, education levels and population density are the significant variables that impact the change in support for the RRP, in addition to spatial and temporal control variables. We argue that our methodology, which produces models with considerably better fit of the complexity and nonlinearities often found in social systems, provides a better tool for hypothesis testing and exploration of theories about RRPs and other social movements. This article is part of the theme issue 'Coupling functions: dynamical interaction mechanisms in the physical, biological and social sciences'.

Where does ethnic concentration matter for populist radical right support? An analysis of geographical scale and the halo effect

It is often hypothesised that the share of the population in an area belonging to an ethnic minority group positively influences the support for populist radical right-wing parties among native residents. However, empirical tests of this relationship have yielded mixed results, which may be a result of the wide variety of geographical scales at which ethnic concentration has been measured. Furthermore, it may be that it is the spatial distribution of minorities within the residential area that matters for radical right support, rather than their overall group size. The present study examines these issues by constructing egohoods and halos of varying sizes around respondents' homes. Connecting survey data from the Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study to detailed geographical data on ethnic concentration, it is found that support for the Dutch PVV is high in areas with low shares of minorities and decreases in areas with higher minority shares, up to a tipping point when minorities make up around 25% of the population. When shares of ethnic minorities become even larger, we tentatively conclude that support for the PVV increases again. This observed U-shaped pattern is consistent across distance-based egohoods ranging in radii from 200 to 5000 m, population-based egohoods with between 4000 and 120000 inhabitants, and administrative neighbourhoods, districts, and municipalities. Additionally, this study found that, in urban areas, native residents of relatively homogenous neighbourhoods whose surrounding area – the ‘halo’ – harbours a pronounced cluster of minority residents are more likely to support the radical right.

Do Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Legislature Affect Representation in Government? A Cross-National Analysis

ABSTRACT The presence of right-wing populist parties in legislatures has the potential to change the calculus of government formation. I examine the effects of right-wing populist parties on four characteristics of governments in 14 Western democracies: (1) government size; (2) government fragmentation; (3) ideological dispersion/polarisation; and (4) ideological congruence between governments and legislatures. The findings suggest that right-wing populist parties are associated with declines in government size; however, the other effects are found to work through general patterns of legislative fragmentation.

CasaPound Italia: ‘Back to Believing. The Struggle Continues’

This article aims to be a contribution to the ongoing debate among scholars concerning the question whether recently formed right-wing radical parties represent a new phenomenon and a break with the fascist tradition or whether they remain close to a fascist ideology. The author focuses on a specific national radical right-wing party: CasaPound Italia (cpi), founded at the beginning of this century, which declares itself to be ‘fascist’. While existing research insists on the intervention of external factors such as the economic crisis of 2008 in order to explain a new ‘wave’ of right-wing radicalism in Italy, this article will show the constant evolving of right-wing radical discourse over a longer historical period. The analysis will mainly delve into the ideological and political role played by three leading exponents of the Italian and European radical right: Pino Rauti, Roberto Fiore and Gabriele Adinolfi. Through a narrative style, and using a historical approach and qualitative analysis, this paper argues that their experiences represent the roots and sources for Gianluca Iannone’s project with cpi.

Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream?, edited by Akkerman, Tjitske, Sarah L. de Lange, and Matthijs RooduijnAfter Europe, written by Ivan Krastev

Radical Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Into the Mainstream?, edited by Akkerman, Tjitske, Sarah L. de Lange, and Matthijs RooduijnAfter Europe, written by Ivan Krastev