| Strategic Moves 2 |

 

Radical Parties’ Strategic Moves II:
Position Taking on Economic and Socio-economic Policy

3.1. From whispering to shouting: a taxonomy of RRPs’ blurring strategies on economic policy after 1990

Matteo Cavallaro (Centre d’économie de l’Université Paris Nord (CEPN))

Our research aims to provide a global analysis of the differences between European RRPs’ positions on economic matters with a specific focus to the attention paid by the different RRPs to these issues. We do so by analysing data from the MARPOR project database that has been treated according to Lowe et al.’s (2011) transformation. We cover 42 different RRPs across 22 European countries over a period ranging from 1990 to 2017. Our findings show that economic issues are still less important in RRPs programmes than in those of other political families. However, the gap has been reducing as RRPs, in their programmes, talk more about the economy than before.

The article then describes RRPs’ heterogeneity on economic issues. We draw a cartography of the ‘economic policy space’ within the radical right party family. We do so by the means of various statistical methods (PCF and Ward’s method) applied to manifestos data from the MARPOR project database. We find four dimensions that can describe large part of the differences between RRPs on economic matters. These dimensions all describe the “salience” of a set issues and we labelled them ‘Welfare’, ‘Economic Liberalism’, ‘Economic Management’ and ‘Protectionism”’ Our results show that RRPs are still very different in their economic programmes in terms of contents and, using Ward’s clustering method, we regroup RRPs in four classes: ‘neo-liberal’, ‘pro-welfare’, ‘blurring-by-muting’, and ‘blurring-by-multiplying’. In particular, we highlight a trend from a ‘blurring-by-muting’ towards a ‘blurring-by-multiplying’ strategy by most RRPs on economic matters.  We conclude with a preliminary account of the possible determinants of this change of strategy and find that the economic situation does not seem to be a valid explanation, while the adoption of similar strategies by non-RR parties appears to be the strongest predictor.

3.2. The New Working Class Party? The Impact of Radical Right Parties’ Economic Position on Working Class Support

Eelco Harteveld (University of Amsterdam), Stefan Dahlberg (University of Gothenburg), Andrej Kokkonen (University of Gothenburg), Rune Stubager (Aarhus University),

A lot of recent academic and journalistic interest has focused on the question whether Radical Right-wing Populist (RRP) parties are becoming the (main) political voice of the working class. Allegedly, this results from the fact that RRP parties not only promise cultural but increasingly also economic protection to the working class. However, to what extent does the latter matter to working class voters? In this study, we investigate the extent to which RRP parties’ support among this group depends on the economic positions they take. First, we track European RRP parties’ positions on economic issues through space and time (based on manifesto’s) and link this to these parties’ support among the working class (using CSES). Second, we conduct a survey experiment in which Norwegian, Swedish and Danish respondents are confronted with either an economicallyright-wing or an economically left-wing element taken from the national RRP party’s program. We test whether this matters to working class respondents. Together, this design allows to test the relation between party stance and working class with relatively high levels of both generalizability and causal leverage.

3.3. Coalition Signals about Radical Parties

Ida Hjermitslev (Duke University)

How are the perceptions of radical right and left parties affected by government partic- ipation? Recent studies suggest that voters estimate party positions is by using a coalition heuristic and perceive parties that serve together in cabinet to be more ideologically similar. Given that radical parties are characterized by both ambiguous and extreme positions on the left-right dimension, but also by avoiding to take a position at all, a coalition signal might be particularly informative if radical parties join coalition governments. Using survey data from the European Election Study (1989-2014), I examine how voters perceive the ideological distance between radical parties and their coalition partners. I find that the perceptions of the radical right is much more affected by governing in a coalition than perceptions of the radical left. This is most likely due to differences in their electoral strategies.

3.4. Gendering Differences in Party Preferences: Gender Ideologies and the Radical Right

Andreas Jozwiak (UNC Chapel Hill)

This paper demonstrates that gender ideologies are an important predictor of preferences for radical TAN parties, and the differences in gender attitudes help explain the
gender gap. Previous work on the gender gap has shown that men and women hold different attitudes, personality traits, and socio-economic positions that reflect differences in voting patterns (Harteveld and Ivarsflaten 2016, Harteveld et al. 2015) I argue that a previously unconsidered determinant of party preferences is gender ideologies, which are individuals’ beliefs in gendered and separate spheres for men and women. Using Swiss Household Panel from 2000-2014, I show that gender ideologies help explain the gender gap in all waves of the survey. Furthermore, I demonstrate the effect of gender ideologies varies over time. Finally, this article shows how the relationship between gender and immigration issues may be changing and is perhaps the result of tactical shifts by these parties towards using an immigration frame to discuss gender issues.

3.5. Not So Radical After All: Ideological Diversity among Radical Right Voters and Its Implications for Party Competition

Caroline Lancaster (UNC Chapel Hill)

Traditionally, parties on the radical right in Western Europe have espoused socially conservative, pro-family values, strongly opposing women’s rights, reproductive rights, and LGBT rights, in addition to their broader, authoritarian orientations. Radical right voters have been assumed to be similar. However, in light of more progressive radical right parties such as the Dutch Party for Freedom, as well as the fact that others, such as the French Front National, have moderated some of their strongest-held positions on these issues, I ask, “What are the ideological characteristics of radical right voters, and what are the implications of this for party competition?” Using latent class analysis and the 8th wave of the European Social Survey, this article is the first to find that only a minority of radical right voters conform to the traditional conceptualization – the remainder are either moderate or progressive nativists. Second, using logistic regression, I argue that radical right parties lose votes as their positions become more extreme and that generally, more moderate parties exist in countries with more moderate voters. Conditioned on the ideological makeup of their country, radical right parties face a trade-off between moderating and staying extreme.