Do radical right fringe parties affect main parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)? Using data from the Manifesto Project, we analyze the relationship between radical right fringe parties’ and...
#2Adam Fagan('KCL': King's College London)H-Index: 12
Much of the literature on fringe political parties in post-communist Europe focused on the relationship with mainstream parties. Little is known about what happens at the fringes, what are the feat...
This article investigates how the success of radical right parties affects the policy positions of mainstream parties. We do this using a regression discontinuity approach that allows us to causally attribute mainstream parties’ positional changes to radical right strength independent of public opinion as a potential confounder. Making use of exogenous variation created through differences in electoral thresholds, we empirically demonstrate that radical right success, indeed, causally affects ma...
#1Bartek Pytlas(LMU: Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)H-Index: 6
Particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, but also in "the West," radical right politics established itself in the mainstream and continues to challenge liberal democracy from within. While there is broad consensus that radical right politics in both regions constitute an exclusionary, anti-pluralist counter-reaction against societal modernization, the discussion continues whether the radical right in the East remains a contextually distinctive phenomenon sui generis, or rather becomes increas...
Over the last three decades a great deal of research has been carried out in an attempt to explain the electoral performance of radical right parties in Europe. Most approaches concentrate on demand-side determinants and have some limitations. We compensate for these shortcomings and focus on the context of party competition and supply-side determinants (consistency of ideological discourse, functioning party propaganda, the continuity of the leader in office and strong party organization) to ex...
AbstractIn every democracy, established political parties are challenged by other parties. Established parties react in various ways to other parties’ presence. A key hypothesis in the relevant literature is that established parties can decrease another party’s electoral support by parroting it, i.e. adopting its core policy issue position. This article argues, and demonstrates empirically, that this hypothesised effect mainly occurs in the event that a critical prerequisite is in place. Parroti...
The emergence of the radical right as a strong competitor to mainstream parties has fundamentally reshaped patterns of competition in many European party systems. In this article, we systematically explore changes to the ideological landscape in Western Europe by examining whether there has been programmatic mainstreaming of radical right parties due to (a) accommodation to and (b) moderation by radical right parties. We examine positions and salience on liberal-authoritarianism and the salience...
Abstract This article presents electoral developments and mobilization issues of the extreme right political parties between 1993 and 2016. It analyzes the changes in the extreme right discourses and framing strategies in relation to their electoral results. We argue that during the transition to democracy in the 1990s and partially later in the 2000s, the extreme right parties were predominantly focusing on the issues related to national sovereignty and were successful mostly in the context of ...
Populist parties increasingly take a welfare chauvinistic position. They criticize mainstream parties for cutting and slashing welfare at the expense of the ‘native’ population and to the benefit of the ‘undeserving’ immigrant. Given the electoral success of populist parties, we investigate whether and when mainstream parties ignore, attack or accommodate welfare chauvinism. Using key theories of party behaviour, we test whether mainstream parties (1) respond immediately to populist parties, (2)...
This article answers the question of why certain European mainstream parties have changed their policy positions on the GAL-TAN (Green/Alternative/Libertarian vs. Traditional/Authoritarian/Nationalist) dimension in recent years. I argue that these changes can be explained through the electoral success of new right-wing populist parties and the ideological proximity of conservative mainstream parties towards these parties. These arguments were tested with econometric models of mainstream parties’...