The Puzzle of Populist Right Success in Western Europe

In the current debate about the causes of the populist right’s success in several multiparty democracies in Western Europe, too few explanations have focused on the contradictions in the coalitions voting for these parties. One reason for this neglect is lack of easily available appropriate survey data. By analyzing and comparing national election studies, this article is able to overcome some of those problems. Another reason for the neglect is that those who have analyzed the populist right’s success in Western Europe have tended to over-emphasize the importance of new alignments in the electorates. This article, by contrast, shows that the coalition voting for the populist right is deeply divided over central issues on the socioeconomic dimension of politics, such as the desirable size of the public sector and the extent to which the state should regulate the economy. To solve the puzzle of the populist right’s simultaneous success among an unusual and uneasy coalition of voters, then, we need to pay closer attention to party competition dynamics. Working Paper November 2002. Comments to be addressed to: Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, Ph. D. candidate, Nuffield College, Oxford University New Road, OX1 1NF Oxford, U.K. Tel: +(44)1865-278575 Fax: +(44)1865-278621 [email protected] Acknowledgements: For comments on earlier versions of this paper that convinced me to change and improve it significantly, I am thankful to Robert Andersen, Geoffrey Evans, Herbert Kitschelt and Kenneth Shepsle. For sharing unpublished work that had the same effect, I would like to thank David Mayhew. In addition, this paper rely on data that was collected by the Belgian Interuniversity Center for Political Opinion Research, the French Centre d’etude de la vie politique francaise, and the Danish Data Archive. I am also indebted to the Extreme Right Electoral and Party Success network that standardized the socio-demographic measures used in this article and to the British Academy that funded that endeavour.