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The Paradox of Nationalism: The Common Denominator of Radical Left and Radical Right Euroscepticism
Abstract
This paper asks what explains similar Eurosceptic positions between radical right and radical left parties. In answering this question, it focuses on the paradoxical role of nationalism as an integral part of the discourse of both radical right and radical left wing parties. Although these two party families differ in terms of origins, transnational links and policy and although nationalism is usually associated with parties of the right in the literature, this paper argues that in fact nationalism cuts across party lines and is associated with both party families’ opposition to European integration. In order to test our argument, we employ a mixed methods approach. First, we use a new dataset from the 2009 Euromanifestos Project (EMP), which coded party manifestos. We have isolated questions that refer to nationalism and European integration and examine broad policy parallels between the two party families across Europe. Second, we apply the findings from the quantitative analysis on Greece and France as two countries with a strong presence of both radical right and radical left small parties.
... When investigating the relationship between Euroscepticism and populism, it is often assumed that the two are closely related, even though Euroscepticism is influenced by the position on the political spectrum (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2008). It is often argued that Euroscepticism is located at the extremes (Halikiopoulou, Nanou and Vasilopoulou 2012;Hooghe, Marks and Wilson 2002;De Vries and Edwards 2009) and that populist parties are likely to be more radical (Rooduijn and Akkerman 2017). This has resulted in a viewpoint that populist parties are more likely to be Eurosceptic than mainstream or centrist parties (Plaza-Colodro, Gómez-Reino and Marcos-Marne 2018; Gómez-Reino, Cachafeiro and Plaza-Colodro 2018: 347). ...
... Nevertheless, there are traces of protecting the national population also within the populist left. Some researchers would argue that the commitment to nationalism is more a commonality than a difference between populisms left and right (Halikiopoulou, Nanou and Vasilopoulou 2012), whereas others would maintain that left-wing populists are not concerned with national sovereignty, but with popular sovereignty (Gerbaudo and Screti 2017;Damiani and Viviani 2019). When discussing left-wing positions towards Brexit, for instance, this is seen as stemming from a careful balance of protecting the domestic working population, whilst at the same time resisting neoliberal Europe and remaining in solidarity with the working class in other countries. ...
... This dichotomy is well-established in the literature, and Rovira Kaltwasser has even claimed that the main opposition to right-wing populism does not come from left-wing populists, but what can be termed the cosmopolitan elite (Rovira Kaltwasser 2017). It has been argued that right-and left-wing populists both see the nation-state as the primary arena for politics (Halikiopoulou, Nanou and Vasilopoulou 2012). Similarly, left radical parties in Europe are generally seen as sceptical to the neoliberal project of the EU (Keith 2017). ...
Much attention has been devoted to how right-wing populists in Europe challenge the consensus on the benefits of European integration, but left-wing resistance to the EU is less discussed. Existing analyses tend to distinguish between three constructions of political community: a postnational EU, the populist right invoking national sovereignty, and the populist left invoking popular sovereignty. However, empirical analyses struggle to find consensus on how left populists relate to the EU, and if they invoke claims to national or popular sovereignty. This article argues that this empirical impasse stems from that populism and Euroscepticism are performative categories and not simply analytical tools, and serve to produce exclusion. There are two dichotomies in this exclusionary frame: emotional populists/rational EU, and the postnational EU/nationalist populists. Through an analysis of Podemos in Spain and the UK Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, I show how the lines between the postnational EU, the national sovereign, and the popular sovereign are frailer than previously thought. The article concludes that these categories are less analytically astute than they are politically motivated, and analyses of the populist left in Europe must consider the performative dimension of its key terms.
... RLEs believe that the EU contains an institutional asymmetry in favor of market making instead of market regulation (Scharpf, 1996). However, as Halikiopoulou et al. (2012) note, RLEs have become increasingly nationalistic, justifying their opposition to the EU on the basis of national sovereignty. ...
... This view brings them closer to their radical-right counterparts. However, unlike the radical right, radical-left Euroskeptic platforms are based on economic and territorial nationalism and see the EU as an imperialist entity that pursues the interests of the neoliberal ruling class (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012). According to RLEs, egalitarian social policies cannot be realized within the current post-Lisbon institutional framework (Meijers, 2017). ...
... Campact's activists effectively used selective trigger words and provocative framing in public speeches and debates to win public support against the TTIP, as they asserted that the TTIP's provisions serve big businesses instead of ordinary people and undermine Europe's democratic standards (Burchard, 2016;Campact, n.d.). This argument fit with RLEs' image of the EU as an imperialist entity that pursues the interests of the neoliberal ruling class (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012). ...
This study aims to analyze the correlation between radical-left Euroskeptic (RLE) activity and European Union (EU) trade policy by focusing on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). At the beginning of TTIP negotiations, the agreement was not high on political agendas and was not a major concern within European society. Thus, its salience was low. This initial lack of interest stemmed from the fact that the TTIP, as an economic and technical issue, did not draw public attention. This study shows that RLEs profoundly affected public opinion on the TTIP by increasing its salience during the European parliamentary elections in 2014 in France and Germany. Second, RLEs involved social actors and non-governmental organizations in anti-TTIP campaigns and channeled European anxieties into the STOP TTIP European Citizens’ Initiative. Third, RLEs used this proposed agreement between the EU and the United States to increase polarization within European society and ideological cleavages within the European Parliament. Finally, we can assume that an anti-TTIP campaign promoted by radical-right Euroskeptics would have had different drivers. Thus, my findings have implications for understanding the correlation between RLE activity and the politicization of EU trade policy, and they suggest some avenues for future research.
... However, RLPs' Euroscepticism tends to be discussed in terms of the broad 'hard' vs 'soft' dichotomy (for example Charalambous, 2011;Braun et al., 2019). Indeed, some scholars place it in the close proximity of the Euroscepticism of the nationalist right (Hooghe et al., 2002;Halikiopoulou et al., 2012), although that association is not always justified. Against this background, arguably the most nuanced attempt so far to classify the RLP Euroscepticism belongs to Keith (2017), who does acknowledge the existence of a hard, or 'Rejectionist', and a soft Euroscepticism. ...
... Indeed, it is not uncommon that left-wing Euroscepticism is conflated with that of the nationalist or populist right (e.g. Hooghe et al., 2002;Halikiopoulou et al., 2012). For example, while noting that, unlike RLPs, 'radical right-wing parties express nationalism by stressing its ethnic and cultural elements' (p. ...
... For example, while noting that, unlike RLPs, 'radical right-wing parties express nationalism by stressing its ethnic and cultural elements' (p. 532), Halikiopoulou et al. (2012) nevertheless argue that RLPs and radical right parties 'share elements of nationalist ideology leading to a common Eurosceptic stance' (p. 505). ...
Despite attempts in the broader literature to go beyond a binary classification of party-based Euroscepticism, Eurosceptic radical left parties are still generally divided into those advocating reform of the EU and those calling for an exit from the EU. The most notable exception is the classification proposed by Keith (2017), who distinguishes between Rejectionist, Conditional and Expansionist Euroscepticism. However, this article argues that a new form of left-wing Euroscepticism has emerged since 2016, which does not fit with any of the existing classifications. It is the position put forward by 'Plan B for Europe', a transnational initiative of radical left parties, which advocates a disobedient approach towards the EU that simultaneously aims for the reformation of the latter while preparing for a break from it. This is a novel type of party-based Euroscepticism that should supplement Keith's classification.
... On the one hand, radical-left parties, by rejecting values and practices of contemporary capitalism, have been more prone to oppose the 'neoliberal' bias of European integration, which jeopardizes their redistributive policy goals (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012). On the other hand, radical-right parties, characterized by nativist, authoritarian, and populist values (Mudde 2009), have framed their Euroscepticism in more cultural-identitarian terms, relating European integration to migration flows and threats to national identity/sovereignty (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012). ...
... On the one hand, radical-left parties, by rejecting values and practices of contemporary capitalism, have been more prone to oppose the 'neoliberal' bias of European integration, which jeopardizes their redistributive policy goals (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012). On the other hand, radical-right parties, characterized by nativist, authoritarian, and populist values (Mudde 2009), have framed their Euroscepticism in more cultural-identitarian terms, relating European integration to migration flows and threats to national identity/sovereignty (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012). ...
Party-system dynamics and party EU ideology have traditionally influ�enced trends in EU issue-voting, with opposition and Eurosceptic
parties being more likely to benefit electorally from EU issues. While
the electoral benefits of Eurosceptic and opposition parties on the EU
have been separately analysed, less is known about the persistence of
these preference configurations when Eurosceptic parties move into
government. This raises a key question: Does the electoral potential of
Eurosceptic parties change once they take over government? We
address this question focusing on the Italian case, which, due to the
experience of having had a fully-fledged Eurosceptic cabinet in the
2018–2019 period, allows us to test whether changes in governing/
opposition status affect the electoral performance of Eurosceptic/
Europhile parties on EU issues. While confirming that Italian voters
are likely, electorally, to reward opposition and Eurosceptic parties on
Europe more than governing and Europhile parties, the article shows
that Eurosceptic parties, by assuming government office, tend to lose
their electoral advantage on EU issues, not only as compared to
Europhile parties, but also to Eurosceptic parties remaining in opposition. In contrast, governing/opposition status does not condition the electoral potential of Europhile parties on the EU dimension.
... Second, the study of Halikiopoulou et al. (2012) identified an increasing party polarization on issues of cultural identity and European integration independent of the left-right dimension. The authors concluded that radical right and left populist parties "side together on the axis measuring opposition to/support of European integration as well as on the dimension measuring levels of nationalism" (p. ...
... In a similar vein, the study of Rama and Santana (2019) also shows that detachment from Europe increases the likelihood of voting a populist party, right and left being indistinguishable. However, as Halikiopoulou et al. (2012) pointed out, right-wing populist parties express their nationalist and Eurosceptic stances from a predominantly ethnic viewpoint while left-wing populist parties adopt a predominantly civic perspective. In this regard, the study of Plaza-Colodro et al. (2018) shows that populist parties indeed share a Eurosceptic profile but a further examination indicates that their positions toward the EU are mediated by their thick ideology: rightwing populist parties' Euroscepticism is directed against the foundational pillars of the EU (i.e., integration and borders) while left-wing populist parties focus their opposition to the economic dimension of the organization. ...
The prototypical form of populism in Europe has been that of the radical right, which combines populism with nationalism, xenophobia and certain doses of authoritarianism. European left-wing populism, for its part, had remained a marginal phenomenon until the outbreak of the economic crisis in 2008. Since then, populism has ceased to be a phenomenon almost exclusively for the radical right and has spread along the ideological spectrum or has appeared with ambiguous ideological positions. The recent electoral advances of populism in Europe have led to the formation of coalition governments between populist parties of different ideological signs (first in Greece, then in Italy). Likewise, the programmatic evolution followed by some populist parties (e.g., the populist radical right's shift to the economic center, or even center-left) or some similarities between these parties beyond their populist rhetoric (e.g., Euroscepticism), indicates that European populist parties may have more in common than might be expected. This leads us to the following question: Are we witnessing the triumph of populism over ideology? That is, do left and right populist parties tend to converge on other issues that are beyond their populist rhetoric? Or do left-right differences remain hegemonic? This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of populism in Europe. In particular, this article aims to determine whether underlying ideology triumphs over populism in these types of political organizations or not. In order to do that, this study will analyze the ideological positioning and cohesiveness of populist parties in Western Europe at both party and electorate levels. Therefore, the ultimate goal of this research is to shed light on a phenomenon that is advancing electorally in Europe and that could determine future coalitions and government alliances.
... If compared with the radical right, RLPs are studied regarding populism, Euroscepticism or radical ideologies and voters (e.g. Fagerholm 2018a;Halikiopoulou et al. 2012). Social democratic parties appear in comparative studies on 'left-wing' parties or as the main competitors of RLPs in some party systems (e.g. ...
... However, in addition to expanding the existing base of comparative studies, it could be useful to combine research designs ('mixed designs') to analyze certain aspects of RLPs from different perspectives, in order to cross-validate results or explore causal mechanisms (cf. Toshkov 2016: 310-318) -for example, combine 'intensive' case studies with large-n analysis (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012). ...
The 2008 economic crisis brought an increasing support for some European radical left parties (RLPs) and renewed academic attention to this party family. This article retrospectively assesses the literature on RLPs by conducting a scoping review under the following research question: How have European radical left parties been studied since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989)? Using an adapted version of the PRISMA framework, it analyzes 197 articles published between 1990 and 2019 to show that, despite the growing scholarship, significant gaps persist in the literature. Important aspects of RLPs have yet to be explored (e.g. party organization, policy impact), while uneven geographic coverage has left some relevant countries and parties in the background. By providing an overview of the field, it identifies new avenues for future research on the topic and shows how scoping reviews can be a method of interest also for political scientists.
... More importantly, the substantive differences in the positions of mainstream versus radical parties on globalisation and welfare issues are also large and meaningful. Separate from differences in how salient globalisation is to parties, the radical right and to some extent also the radical left have been more anti-globalisation nationalist than have the mainstream parties, including on issues of trade, investment, and the EU (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012;Hooghe et al. 2002). This skew varies depending on the face of globalisation, with radical right parties tending to decry all pooling of national sovereignty, for cultural and political reasons as well as for economic reasons related to defending national welfare states. ...
... And radical-right parties have been particularly nativist with respect to immigration. Radical left parties, on the other hand, are particularly focussed on critiquing the economic and neoliberal faces of globalisation and EU-integration (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012) and have been more supportive of general global cosmopolitanism and are generally more pro-immigration than mainstream parties (Rooduijn et al. 2017). But generally, we can expect a U-shaped pattern in anti-globalisation nationalism as one moves from the extreme left, through to more centrist parties, onward to the extreme-right parties (Hix 1999;Hooghe et al. 2002;Taggart 1998). ...
In industrialised democracies, welfare state provisions have offsetting implications for anti-globalisation nationalism, central to the position taking of populist radical-right parties. On the one hand, social protection has an ‘embedded liberalism’ effect, mitigating economic insecurities associated with globalisation and thereby dampening anti-globalisation nationalism. On the other hand, social protection has an ‘embedded nationalism’ effect, awakening worries that globalisation may undermine hard-won provisions, thereby deepening anti-globalisation. This paper argues and finds evidence that which of these dynamics predominates depends on the particular kind of anti-globalisation debated and on the particular party family doing the debating. Welfare effort does generally dampen anti-globalisation nationalism, but it can deepen more than dampen anti-globalisation with respect to immigration and EU-integration that more directly impact existing national welfare provisions. Welfare effort can also deepen more than dampen anti-globalisation among radical-right and radical-left parties taking issue-ownership of anti-globalisation and of protecting national welfare-state competencies from global pressure.
... Prominently excluded from the nation are various ethnic minorities -racial, religious, linguistic, and indigenous -but also potentially sexual and other minorities. The left-right ideological space is present but less prominent in discussions of the inclusiveness of nationalism (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012;Brubaker 2017). Instead whether nationalism is based on more mutable attributes and thus inclusive of minorities and/or immigrants is linked to their association with related ideologies such as liberalism (Tamir 1995;Gustavsson and Miller 2020), multiculturalism (Kymlicka and Banting 2006), or pluralism (Castles 2010;Favell 2016;Miller 1995a). ...
This article builds an original, analytical framework to understand one of the most important developments of our times — the global ascendance of leaders who fuse populist anti-elite rhetoric with nationalist appeals. In contrast to arguments that treat populism and nationalism as either completely separate or essentially equivalent phenomena, I begin from an understanding of the two as distinct ideologies that grow from a shared foundational claim to represent an “us” versus a “them.” In part 1, I first juxtapose populism and nationalism around this common, undergirding us-them boundary to bring out their core features. I then analyze how populism and nationalism vary across the twin axes of intensity and inclusiveness to bring out their distinct sub-types. In part 2, I use this theoretical map of populism and nationalism to navigate the conceptual terrain of their intersection. I focus, in particular, on the implications of nationalist populism for those seen as “us” versus those viewed as “them,” where the “us” and “them” are determined by the dimensions of intensity and inclusiveness. In contrast to characterizations of nationalist populism in directional terms as negative, I suggest that it is instead better understood as an amplifying force that exacerbates both the positive and negative consequences of populism. All else equal, relative to populism, those beyond nationalist populist boundaries are subject to heightened hostility and discrimination, while those within benefit from enhanced life opportunities.
... These studies attribute a specific importance to populist radical right parties, whose emergence has crucially contributed to ending the 'permissive consensus' on European integration (Pirro & Taggart, 2018). This is because the core ideological feature of the far right is nativism (Mudde, 2019), which is at odds with EU integration and notably the freedom of movement (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012;Kopecký & Mudde, 2002). Using the example of the French FN/RN, however, scholars also suggested that the positions of far-right parties on the EU could change over time (Crépon et al., 2015). ...
This article examines public contestation of Europe by the far right in France. It investigates whether far-right mobilization on the EU has changed over time, and how it diverges in the party and non-party sectors. Specifically, we follow a politicization approach and address mobilization in terms of three interrelated dimensions: intensity, issue focus, and action repertoire. This allows comparing collective action in the electoral and protest arenas, thus assessing how the far right politicizes Europe in public debates. The study relies on a mixed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the content of the press releases posted by far-right parties and movements on their official websites, scraped automatically from 2012 to 2019. The results show that European integration is increasingly at the core of far-right politics in France, but its politicization unfolds in different ways in the protest and electoral arenas. As political conflict over the EU expands, far-right parties and non-party actors are challenged to differentiate their respective profiles. These findings complement existing research on the linkages between protest and elections, and suggest that the rooting of the far right in society is reconfiguring the structure of political conflict in Europe.
... These accounts are particularly pessimistic about the normative consequences for democratic legitimacy, insofar as they point to the weakening of ties between the voting public on one side and the policy output and accountability of governments on the other (Mair, 2013). Public, and particularly populist, contestation over international integration precisely emphasises the relationship between national institutions and citizens that are being altered in the wake of greater integration (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012). ...
Recent research argues that European integration has led to an ideological convergence of member state party systems, which is purported to have significant consequences for democratic representation. We argue that convergence of party positions is less problematic if congruence between governed and governing is maintained. We therefore turn to test whether integration has had an effect on congruence between the public and their governing elites. Using five measures of integration, two sources of public opinion data, and expert surveys on political parties, we find little evidence that integration into the European Union reduces congruence between the public and the national party system, government or legislature either ideologically or across five issue areas. These results should assuage concerns about integration’s effect on domestic political representation.
... The European Union, by definition, is ruining the mission of nationalists, whose priority is to protect the nation against foreign influence. Hence, nationalist policies are against immigration, labor mobility, and cultural mobility (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012). ...
The Identitarian movement, a radical-right movement active in a number of European countries, desires to unite European nationalists in international action. Nevertheless, the theory claims that the latter ideology is based on nativism. This might create internal ideological conflict between nativism versus transnationalism. The article offers a qualitative analysis of how the movement solves the issue of identity framing on the transnational level. This is a question of how the ethno-nationalist message is transformed to the transnational level, and how national needs are translated into transnational ones. The findings show that the Identitarian movement constructs a two-fold identity – a national one and a European one; and operates with three types of identity framing, thereby building a complex picture of a common past, present, and future. All three frames always act to maintain a balance between both identities, and always work with the language of civilization. Such framing, then, might lead to the successful mobilization of international resources and turn ideas into action.
... One potential avenue would have been to explore the notion of European integration among the populist radical right. Many radical right populist parties are seen as deeply Eurosceptic, due to their opposition to the dominant notion of European integration, which they see as the destruction of the nation-state (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, & Vasilopoulou, 2012). ...
This review follows the structure of the book, exploring the key elements raised by the author, starting with the introduction and proceeding through each of the three sections. The introduction discusses the limits of the friend versus foe narrative in the absence of clarity by drawing upon the theoretical lit- erature on populism and its relationship to democracy (Canovan, 1999; Urbinati, 2014, 2019). This review will focus the discussion around the main themes of each section, namely; the tensions between freedom and sovereignty in the first section, nationalism and antisemitism over time in the second section, and the rejection of the emancipatory promise of modernity by reactionary elements of the radical right in the third section. This review will conclude by assessing the limits and potential of the book, drawing on Popper’s paradox of tolerance (Popper, 2020).
... Moreover, in order to further investigate the relationship between perceived societal anomie and political orientation beyond a mere positioning on a political scale, Study 2 additionally examined whether perceived anomie predicted participants' support for different kind of political proposals-i.e., radical right-wing political proposals vs. proposals that were shared by the far-right and far-left French populist parties in 2017 (e.g., Gougou & Persico 2017;Hewlett 2017) and that we named populist proposals. First, we expected that the support for populist proposals (here, proposals regarding economic redistribution and protectionism) would increase as participants positioned themselves to the political extremes; in line with previous work showing that far-right and far-left parties and voters share populist attitudes (Akkerman et al. 2017) as well as similar stances on economic redistribution (e.g., Gougou & Persico 2017; see also Ivaldi & Mazzoleni 2019 for the stances on economic redistribution of the French far-right party) and protectionism (e.g., Halikiopoulou et al. 2012;Hewlett 2017;Gougou & Persico 2017;van Bohemen et al. 2019). By contrast, we assumed that the support for radical right-wing policies (i.e., with a clear right-wing ideological content; here, right-wing proposals related to immigration, family and economy) would increase as participants positioned themselves to the political right (e.g., Immerzeel et al. 2016). ...
The present research aimed to extend the existing literature on political extremes’ symmetries and asymmetries, by examining the relationship between political extremism and perceived societal anomie (i.e., perceptions that the leadership is disregulated and that the social fabric is disintegrated) across three studies conducted within French samples. The first two studies revealed that perceived leadership disregulation increased as participants position themselves toward either political extreme and was associated with greater support for proposals regarding protectionism and economic redistribution; indicating a symmetry between political extremes. However, perceived social fabric disintegration was not associated with political extremism but was stronger for far-right individuals; thus suggesting an asymmetry between the extremes. The last study, conducted before the 2017 French Presidential elections, showed that, when imagining a future society in which the candidate they supported is elected as President, political extremes, compared to moderates, similarly reported reduced levels of leadership disregulation, but not social fabric disintegration. The present findings therefore suggest both similarities and differences between political extremes’ perception of anomie within current and future French society and extend previous work showing that political extremes share negative views of society.
... However, there are also reasons to believe that voters will not simply exit, but rather voice their discontent with the economy, conditional on voting. Indeed, it seems equally likely that voters will instead vote for change or opt for alternative parties rallying against economic constraints, illustrated by the surge of populist parties across Europe in which sovereignty is a core element of their programme (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012). Empirically, this theoretical concern is supported by several studies. ...
One of the purported effects of international integration is that voters are less able, or less willing, to punish or reward incumbents for economic performance: since governments are less able to influence economic outcomes, economic considerations weigh less for voters at the ballot box. This would have serious implications for democratic legitimacy. Yet the balancing demands hypothesis predicts that voters compensate for this by judging incumbents on non-economic performance instead. In this article, this theory is critiqued theoretically and empirically, putting it to the test for one of the first times at the individual level using the 2019 Belgian Election Study. Combining perceptions of policy performance across six issue areas with novel survey items which measure perceptions of economic constraints, it is shown that whilst performance voting does occur, there is no support for the balancing demands hypothesis. Voting based on performance in economic or non-economic areas remains largely unrelated to perceptions of international constraints.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1953850 .
... This has sharpened the economic case against European integration (Otjes and Katsanidou 2016). Whereas TAN parties in the North strive for the ethnic homogeneity of the nation, radical left parties, predominant in the South, emphasize civic nationalism and territorial control (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012). The distributional framing of the euro crisis also explains why, in the South, radical right parties have so far not been the chief beneficiaries of mainstream disaffection. ...
... Both of which are rejected by this dissertation as I see both processes of politicisation and depoliticisation as dynamic. On the one hand, there is a negative view that politicisation can be a threat to the EU's legitimacy, as it is led by populist actors with nationalistic discourses who may seek to damage the European integration project (e.g Halikiopoulou et al. 2012). Other authors also believe that the effectiveness of the EU can be tampered with if there are too many contestations regarding how it works. ...
The politicisation and depoliticisation of EU policies such as state aid are key to the legitimation and contestation of the EU. However, the existing literature tends to focus on analysing these processes either in terms of politicisation or depoliticisation, but rarely both simultaneously. Rather, this thesis conceptualises politicisation and depoliticisation as embodying a fluid-like state within Multilevel Governance (MLG) structures, such as the EU, where agents play a key role. The thesis first explores 266 state aid cases labelled "Unlawful with Recovery of Aid" (UWRA) to identify which were appealed, and to gauge the degree of news coverage that each case gained. From the analysis of the 266 cases, the dissertation selects the cases of Apple in Ireland and Ilva in Italy for sustained and detailed analysis. It explores how actors have sought to politicise and depoliticise these state aid cases in the national news media. A claims-making analysis is performed to understand how actors attempt to legitimise or delegitimise their own actions or the actions of the other actors involved (the Commission, Apple, Ilva and the Irish and Italian governments). To perform the analysis, a set of 100 newspapers were gathered from the Factiva database, including two leading quality newspapers (centre-left and centre-right) from Ireland (the Irish Times and the Irish Independent) and Italy (Il Sole 24 Ore and La Repubblica). The results show that a key moment in the trajectory of both the politicisation and depoliticisation of a state aid case is the act of appealing by the member state. More specifically, in the Apple case, TINA (There Is No Alternative) was used as a strategy to discursively depoliticise the action of appealing which, interestingly contributed to the overall politicisation of the state aid case. In contrast, other depoliticising strategies ("appeasing" claims) which intended to calm past tensions between the Italian government and the Commission were used successfully. In terms of politicisation, the Apple case showed an "international conflict trajectory" (Irish government versus the Commission) while the Ilva case raised concerns about the Italian government and the management of the corporation. Overall, this dissertation advances understandings of the differentiated patterns of politicisation and depoliticisation by illustrating that the Apple case followed the "politics against policy" route while this was avoided in the Ilva state aid case.
... In my research at the Greek border islands, the group of locals had a lot more grievances toward the European "others" and the international NGO "others" than toward the refugees. This is also related to the ongoing austerity in Greece and the ways that multiple crises have been fueling a longstanding Euroscepticism (Halikiopoulou et al., 2012;Vasilopoulou, 2018). ...
This article offers an analysis of how various actors engaged in and reacted to refugee reception practices in a multi-level governance setting at the main island entry points to the European Union (EU) from the south-east. Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Kos and Leros received almost one million people out of the 1,6 million which arrived in the EU in 2015 and 2016. In the humanitarian emergency, which followed the increased arrivals, the local administration and the local community took important initiatives to fill the gaps of the European and the national responses while also opposing the EU policies which degraded the human dignity of refugees. Drawing on rich qualitative material I demonstrate how solidarity and contestation derive from a complex local reality. The findings of the article point to the consequences of the multilevel governance structure of asylum for actors’ interactions or lack of interaction on the ground of the border islands.
... This is primarily due to the electoral rise of Eurosceptic parties. One core element of their rhetoric is the condemnation of a further European integration, an emphasis of the nation state, and a rejection of the EU as a neoliberal, elite-driven project (see for example Halikiopoulou et al., 2012;Hooghe and Marks, 2009). They do not only oppose the political aspects of European integration but also the economic aspects, which are closely related to EU regional policy (Marks et al., 2002). ...
A key element of the European Union's (EU) attempt to foster citizens' EU identification is its goal to improve citizens' quality of life via its Cohesion policy (CP). Although recent findings demonstrate that the allocation of CP money positively affects sub-national parties' positions on EU integration and CP, we still do not know if sub-national parties actually talk about CP issues in their manifestos. Using a unique data set based on manually coded 812 manifestos written by 95 different parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2016, it is argued that several party-level characteristics are decisive for sub-national parties' emphasis of CP issues. Even though sub-national parties emphasize CP issues only to a small degree, the results of multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions show that it is particularly regional government parties which emphasize CP issues when drafting their regional election manifestos.
... We should mention here that nationalism has many faces, ranging from ethnic and civic nationalism to nativism 2 (Bonikowski et al., 2019;Mudde & Kaltwasser, 2013, p. 2018Halikiopoulou et al., 2012). Yet despite there being different forms we argue in line with Breeze (2018, p. 2) that this does not invalidate the use of the term itself 'as long as we understand this to refer to the core structure of the concept, rather than to details of its manifestation in particular cases'. ...
This article provides an empirical contribution into the discursive repertoire of seven populist radical right-wing parties. Within the context of the European Parliamentary elections of 2014 and 2019, we examine and compare how these parties discursively shape the content of social demands by assessing how ‘the people’, ‘the nation’, ‘the elite’ and ‘others’ are constructed, and how different demands are incorporated. In doing so we assess the specific role of populism and nationalism in these parties’ discourse. We apply a two-stage measurement technique, combining both qualitative and quantitative content analytical modes of research, with advantages over existing methods, looking at both levels and form of the populist and nationalist signifiers. Our results suggest that although parties often combine both populism and nationalism, there is a general disposition to construct the signifer ‘the people’, not primarily through staging an antagonism between ‘people/elite’ (populism), but rather through articulating ‘the people’ as a national community in need of protection from the EU (nationalism). In view of this, we highlight that populism does not operate as the differentia specifica of populist radical right wing parties’ discourse.
... Una tensión traducida en un escepticismo que, además, se está evidenciando especialmente en países que han experimentado una cesión de soberanía hacia organizaciones e instituciones supranacionales, como es el caso de la Unión Europea. En este contexto, las corrientes contrarias a la progresiva integración en esta comunidad han alcanzado cuotas de representación nada desdeñables a nivel comunitario y nacional, llegando a obtener resultados electorales y espacios de poder fundamentales para la vida y el futuro de un país, y, por ende, de las propias instituciones de la Unión (Carey, 2002;Halikiopoulou, Nanou & Vasilopoulou, 2012;Hobolt, 2016;Treib, 2020). ...
EN.
Today’s national and international context has brought the issue of identity back into the
realm of public debate. This debate has become especially visible in nationalist endeavors by states and regions to achieve, respectively, the establishment of a nationalist agenda or an independent state. An understanding of these processes requires our approaching the debate from a broad range of perspectives that take into account political, economic and cultural repercussions; tied closely to this latter area is the realm of education. In order to address these questions, we must focus not only on the present, but examine – with novel approaches and new sources – the past as well.
Pursuant to this, the present doctoral thesis has as its general objective the analysis
of the nationalization processes that took place in the domain of primary education in Italy and Spain between the years 1931 and 1959. To this end, the work has been divided into three different blocks, each one corresponding to a different approach to nationalization.
The first, called The Spains of the Second Republic. The coexistence of nationalizing discourses in schools in the 1930s (1931-1936), attempts to bring into focus the nature of national identity at the time and to describe how the conception of nation was conveyed. The second block is named Italy looks to Spain. National identity and otherness in the portrayal of the Spanish War in Italian primary education under fascism (1936-1943). This section examines, on the one hand, the degree of internationalization of the Spanish conflict in Italian schools under fascism, along with its nationalizing influence and, on the other hand, it looks at the way that otherness was represented and used as a tool for transmitting an identity-based, nationalist discourse. The third and final block, Spain retreats. Between the homogenization of identity and the first glimpses of
national-Catholicism (1939-1959), sets out to describe the post-war context from a socio-educational perspective. After studying the presence –or absence– of political and religious symbols in educational centers, the study delves into the question of languages and their role as elements of identity in teaching under the authoritarian regime.
These issues are tackled by resorting to the historical-educational method and by
using two main primary sources: school textbooks and the collection of memoirs kept by
pedagogy students at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. This store of journals of the students’ training work is known as “Romero Marín” and the collection has yet to be
explored to its full potential. These sources were consulted principally in the Museum/Laboratory of the History of Education “Manuel Bartolomé Cossío”, the MANES
center of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, the Biblioteca Nacional de
España and the Centro di documentazione e ricerca sulla storia del libro scolastico e della letteratura per l’infanzia of the University of Macerata (Italy).
The results of the thesis show, with regard to the first block, the coexistence during the republican period of two clearly differentiated models of nationalism evident in each of the categories of analysis studied. However, given that this discursive difference appears to be more complex in the case of the nationalization of girls.
Our second block of results evidences a broad internationalization of the Spanish Civil War in Italian primary schools of the time as well as the use of the conflict as an element
in the construction of national identity, especially conspicuous in the ideological, military,
emotional, cultural and social discourses that it gave rise to. We also find a propensity for
portraying the other –in this case, the common enemy of the Spanish nationalist troops and their Italian allies– with attributes that represent the essence of antagonism to the fascist identity. And finally, in relation to the third block of results, our access to the teacher training memoirs afforded us a distinct vantage point from which to observe the postwar context as reflected in three basic pillars: the Catholic religion, national identity and the role of women.
These three focal points provided us with a panoramic vision of national-Catholicism and its homogenizing mission in asserting the identity of the Francoist state. However, the studies comprising the last part of this block reveal significant differences with regard to the symbols appearing in educational centers, with religious schools tending to use their own symbols. Prior to the dictatorship, in those regions with greater nationalist tendencies we find regional, provincial and other local symbols displayed in schools. The final study included here, which deals with how the linguistic question was addressed in educational practices and in the social milieu connected to the school, examines a case from the Basque-Navarre context. This example shows us how communication and teaching problems were a constant in the day to day interaction between teachers and students, especially in rural areas and in the northernmost parts of these regions.
Finally, we can conclude, based on our research, that the models of identity construction during the Second Republic were based on a heterogeneous panorama, fruit of the coexistence at the time. After the Civil War, however, a traditionalist, imperialist model
took over. This period, analyzed from the transnational perspective of Italian fascism, reveals the effectiveness of representing otherness in order to establish one’s own national identity.
We were able to examine the surge of national-Catholicism, together with its nationalizing
project in the school, with the aid of a little-used documentary collection which provided us with a unique insight into the symbolic and linguistic realms, based on an analysis of empirical culture. We could well summarize the processes studied here in two concepts: curriculum and practice. The formation of these processes is at times direct - that is, through an explicit definition of the characteristics that make up a national identity – and at times indirect –through an antagonistic definition of the other, or as a result of tensions arising from elements such as symbols or language. These same processes serve to illustrate the transnational scope of identity and otherness in education as seen from a historical perspective.
IT.
L'attuale contesto nazionale e internazionale ha riportato l’attenzione sulla questione
identitaria nel dibattito pubblico. Un dibattito indotto dai tentativi nazionalisti di paesi e
regioni che rappresentano, rispettivamente, la rinascita degli interessi nazionali e della
vocazione a raggiungere uno Stato proprio. Un dibattito che richiede, insomma, molteplici
punti di vista che permettano una migliore comprensione di questi processi, date anche le
loro ripercussioni in campi così ampi e diversi come la politica, l'economia o la cultura e,
legata in particolar modo a quest'ultima, l'istruzione. Punti di vista che devono concentrarsi non solo sullo studio del presente, ma anche sull'analisi del passato con nuovi approcci e nuove fonti.
Come conseguenza di questa realtà, la tesi di dottorato qui presentata ha l'obiettivo
generale di analizzare i processi di nazionalizzazione dell'istruzione primaria in Spagna e in Italia tra il 1931 e il 1959. A tal fine, viene eseguita una suddivisione in tre blocchi in risposta ai diversi criteri di nazionalizzazione. Il primo, chiamato Le Spagne della II República. La coesistenza dei discorsi nazionalisti nelle scuole negli anni Trenta (1931-1936), mira a conoscere quale fosse l'identità nazionale e la concezione della nazione trasmessa in tale periodo. Il secondo è intitolato L'Italia guarda verso la Spagna. Identità nazionale e alterità nella visione della Guerra di Spagna nell'insegnamento elementare italiano del fascismo (1936-1943), e mira, da una parte, a scoprire il grado di internazionalizzazione della guerra civile spagnola nelle scuole del fascismo italiano
e il suo carattere nazionalista e, dall'altra, a analizzare la rappresentazione dell'altro o
dell'alterità come strumento per la trasmissione dell'identità e del discorso nazionalista.
Infine, il terzo blocco, La Spagna si ritira. Tra l'omogeneizzazione dell'identità e i resti del nazional-cattolicesimo (1939-1959), aspira a descrivere il contesto postbellico da una prospettiva socio-educativa, studia la presenza o l'assenza di simbolismo politico e religioso nei centri educativi e indaga, per concludere, sulla questione linguistica come elemento di identità nell'insegnamento durante l'autoritarismo.
Per raggiungere questo obiettivo viene utilizzato il metodo storico-educativo, facendo uso di due principali fonti primarie: i manuali scolastici e il fondo delle memorie di pratiche degli studenti di Pedagogia dell'Università Complutense di Madrid, chiamato “Romero Marín”, che è stato ancora poco esplorato. Queste fonti sono state consultate,
principalmente, nel Museo/Laboratorio di Storia dell'Educazione “Manuel Bartolomé
Cossío”, nel centro MANES dell'Università Nazionale di Formazione a Distanza, nella
Biblioteca Nazionale di Spagna e nel Centro di documentazione e ricerca sulla storia dal libro scolastico e della letteratura per l'infanzia dell'Università degli Studi di Macerata (Italia).
I risultati di questa tesi mostrano, nel primo blocco, la coesistenza di due modelli di
nazionalizzazione chiaramente differenziati nel periodo repubblicano, che si sono manifestati in ciascuna delle categorie di analisi studiate. Tuttavia si tratta, nel caso dell'educazione nazionalista indirizzata alle bambine, di una differenza discorsiva apparentemente più complessa.
Nel secondo blocco di risultati, si osserva una vasta internazionalizzazione della
guerra civile spagnola nella scuola elementare italiana e il suo uso come elemento di
costruzione dell'identità nazionale, un fatto particolarmente palpabile nei discorsi ideologici, militari, emotivi, culturali e sociali. Allo stesso modo, è da constatare l'esistenza di un interesse nel rappresentare l'altro –in questo caso, il nemico comune della parte ribelle e delle truppe alleate italiane– con una serie di attributi che rappresentano l'antagonismo identitario fascista. Infine, per quanto riguarda il terzo blocco di risultati, l'uso delle memorie di pratiche ha permesso di osservare il contesto postbellico attraverso la prospettiva di tre pilastri fondamentali: la religione cattolica, l'identità nazionale e il ruolo delle donne. Tre cardini che hanno permesso di ottenere una visione panoramica del nazional-cattolicesimo e del suo scopo omogeneizzante nell'identità dello Stato franchista. Tuttavia, gli studi che completano quest'ultimo blocco hanno mostrato differenze significative nella rappresentazione simbolica all'interno dei centri educativi, con una tendenza verso un simbolismo specifico nelle istituzioni di proprietà religiosa. Allo stesso modo, in alcune delle regioni con le più grandi pulsioni nazionaliste anteriori al periodo dittatoriale, sono stati rilevati simboli regionali, provinciali e locali. Infine, lo studio che chiude questa ricerca ha evidenziato come il problema linguistico sia stato affrontato nella pratica educativa e nell'ambiente sociale prossimo alla scuola in un caso di studio sul contesto basco-navarrese. In questa ricerca si può osservare come le difficoltà di comunicazione e apprendimento tra insegnanti e studenti
facessero parte della vita quotidiana delle scuole, specialmente nel caso di quelle situate nelle aree rurali e prossime alle zone settentrionali di entrambe le regioni.
Per concludere, i risultati ottenuti ci consentono di stabilire che i modelli di costruzione dell'identità sono partiti da un panorama eterogeneo, nella Seconda Repubblica spagnola, segnato dalla convivenza. Tuttavia, il modello tradizionale e imperialista si sarebbe imposto dopo la guerra civile, un periodo analizzato in una prospettiva transnazionale dal
punto di vista del fascismo italiano, che ha evidenziato l'utilità della rappresentazione
dell'alterità per la stessa formazione dell'identità nazionale. Infine, l'ascesa del nazional-cattolicesimo e il suo progetto di nazionalizzazione della scuola sono stati osservati in un
fondo documentario ancora poco esplorato che si è rivelato una fonte importante anche per un’analisi nel campo simbolico e linguistico attraverso l'analisi della cultura empirica. In sintesi, i processi qui analizzati potrebbero essere riassunti in due: il curricolare e il ratico. Processi la cui formazione, inoltre, risponderebbe a una costruzione diretta –vale a dire,
definendo esplicitamente le caratteristiche che compongono l'identità nazionale stessa– e indiretta –attraverso cioè la definizione antagonistica dell'altro oppure come risultato delle tensioni tra altri elementi come simbologia e lingue–. Processi, questi, che rivelano l'aspetto transnazionale di identità e l'alterità nell'educazione da una prospettiva storica.
... 17 On the other hand, researchers have noticed that Euroscepticism can be observed as a common denominator for both radical right-wing and radical left-wing parties that use nationalism as their ideology. Halikiopoulou, Nanou and Vasilopoulou claim that EU integration can be seen as a 'threat to the nation' which the right wing understands in the ethnic terms, while the left wing in civic terms 18 . As mentioned before, the motivation behind Euroscepticism is very much dependent on the national context, and the attitudes of political parties towards integration may not be directly linked to the EU integration process. ...
Serbia has been an official candidate to become a member of the European Union since 2009 but accession negotiations only began in 2014. Since the start of the accession process, Serbia has been perceived as one of the most Eurosceptic countries of the post-Yugoslav space. The central issue present in both the public and political discourse is the status of Kosovo and the evaluation of the 1999 NATO intervention, hence anti-EU attitudes are fuelled by nationalism, populism and anti-establishment rhetoric. The political arena is divided between the advocates of ‘direction West’ and their adversaries, who not only underline their anti-EU stance but also a need to strengthen ties with Russia and China. Both attitudes are embedded in the past and make great use of contemporary history to motivate and justify their claims. This chapter aims to map and analyse the Eurosceptic rhetoric of the relevant political actors and examine to what extent their arguments are identity and history driven, as well as what is the alternative they propose.
... The academic literature addressing these questions is rich and mature. Scholars of European public opinion have moved beyond simply dichotomies of Eurosceptic/Europhile attitudes and provided more nuanced categorizations (De Vries, 2018;Halikiopoulou et al., 2012;Van Elsas et al., 2016). A related scholarship has examined how the European 'dimension' fits into established structures of political competition in Europe (De Vries and Marks, 2012;König et al., 2017;Wheatley and Mendez, 2021;Whitefield and Rohrschneider, 2019). ...
One of the major findings of the literature on Euroscepticism is that support for European integration generally declines as one moves closer to the extremes of the left-right ideological spectrum. However, in multidimensional policy space, Euroscepticism varies in more complex ways. This article explores the relief of Euroscepticism for citizens in four European states – the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and France – based on data from voting advice applications fielded before the 2019 elections of the European Parliament. The results reveal that the way Euroscepticism maps onto other dimensions differs significantly for citizens and for parties and across political contexts. Such variation is important for understanding how preferences for European integration are embedded into existing structures of political competition.
... In the literature on European integration, politicization is defined as 'the process of more publicly visible contestation related to the various dimensions of European integration' which are activated by partisan actors (Hooghe and Marks 2009;Hutter, Grande, and Kriesi 2016;Kriesi 2016). Among the many possible dimensions of contestation including the functioning of EU decision-making and its policies (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012;Pirro and van Kessel 2018), we find that the far right predominantly discusses Europe through the lens of a crisis of cultural identity to contest the norms, values, and boundaries that define Europe. These are of course not the only actors that have contested what constitutes Europe (Biebuyck 2010;Diez 2014), but they have often been studied in the context of European foreign policy, bureaucracy, and policymaking, and represent a methodological turn towards the study of how norms and values are articulated in contestation over European integration (Diez 2014). ...
... Due to the inevitable consequences of climate change for displacement and transnational migration flows of climate refugees across borders (Davis et al. 2018), nationalists should therefore perceive climate change as a threat to their national culture. Furthermore, nationalism also tends to involve economic protectionism (Halikiopoulou et al. 2012). For instance, nationalists often view migration as an economic threat resulting in an increasing strain on national public finances (Colantone and Stanig 2019). ...
Rising rightwing populism (RWP) potentially constitutes an obstacle to climate change mitigation, as European RWP parties and politicians often espouse climate change skepticism and oppose climate policies. Meanwhile, their party positions and issue stances have also become increasingly characterized by nationalism. Using European Social Survey data from 2016, we show that public attitudes consistent with nationalist ideology are clearly linked to voting for RWP parties and that people who hold these attitudes are more likely to be skeptical about climate change and to oppose policies that increase taxes on fossil fuels. With regard to policy attitudes, we find that nationalist ideology is more influential than traditional left-right political ideology, environmental values and political trust. The results also reveal substantial cross-national differences, as nationalist ideology is linked more closely to public views about climate change in Western European countries, where RWP parties with a nationalist rhetoric have had recent electoral successes.
... In general, left-wing populists prioritize a vertical type of exclusion -against the elite-rather than a horizontal one -against migrants, refugees or foreigners-which is more common among radical-right and nationalist parties (Verbeek and Zaslove 2017: 391-399; De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2020). However, borders are still relevant elements to understand many radical-left populist parties as they may also embrace nationalistic and Eurosceptic discourses (Halikiopoulou, Nanou, and Vasilopoulou 2012;Rama and Santana 2020). ...
This article argues theoretically and illustrates empirically that the "border" and "populism" are mutually constitutive concepts and should be considered as epistemic frameworks to understand each other. It compares quantitatively and qualitatively the electoral manifestos of four radical right parties-Vox, RN, UKIP, and Brexit Party-, and shows that borders are basic factors in the process of decontestation of "the people" and construction of exclusion-inclusion narratives. Likewise, this analysis exemplifies how (re)bordering claims are usually justified and articulated via populist discursive elements such as antagonism, morality, idealization of society, popular sovereignty and personalistic leadership. This article demonstrates that the border can become a method to study populism and vice versa and that cross-fertilization between the borders and populism literatures is desirable. Further research is needed to understand whether populists' selective instrumentalization of borders and equivalential logic leads to a non-binary hierarchical "othering" and the emergence of a populist "meta-us".
This book examines VOX, the first major and electorally successful populist radical right-wing party to emerge in Spain since the death of General Franco, and the restoration of parliamentary democracy in the late 1970s.
In December 2018, VOX, a new party on the populist radical right, entered the Andalusian regional parliament, and played the role of kingmaker in the ensuing government formation discussions. Since then, under the leadership of Santiago Abascal, VOX has earned political representation in numerous local, regional and national elections. The party attracted more than 3.6 million votes in the November 2019 general election, making VOX the third largest party in the Spanish Congress. In two years, the party has become a key political challenger and an important player in Spanish politics. This book explains the origins of the party, its ideology and relationship with democracy, its appeal with voters, and its similarities with (and differences from) other populist radical right parties in Europe. It draws upon a rich source of domestic as well as cross-national survey data and a systematic analysis of party manifestos which provide a detailed account of the rise of VOX and what its emergence means for Spanish politics.
This volume will be of interest to scholars of comparative politics, political parties, voters and elections, Spanish politics, the populist radical right and populism in general.
The Brexit referendum campaign was characterised by blaming of the EU, with blame seemingly inextricable from politics. However, what is not clear from existing research is what blame actually does to the people who read, hear, or otherwise consume it (the ‘audience’). Does blame actually matter? Specifically, in what ways does exogenous blame make villains in politics, as characters who are bad, strong, and active, and whom we feel negatively towards? Such a question is vital in the context of affective polarisation, where it is not simply that we disagree with our opponents—it is it that we experience negative emotions towards them.
This research applies an abductive approach grounded in a critical realist ontology that cycles between theory and empirical data. Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotions is introduced to connect societal ‘feeling structures’ discussed in prior international relations work with the human body that has hitherto been absent, while blame is defined as a discursive practice in which a speaker claims a party is doing, or has done, a harmful thing. A data analysis framework is developed that permits for investigation of the effects of discursive practices, calling for identification of context, performance, effects, and points of resistance and contestation. The empirical chapters address each stage of this framework in sequence.
The Brexit referendum campaign is selected as a case study, and a mixed methods design utilising both qualitative content and statistical analyses emerges in-depth meaning and wider generalisability alike. Data analysed includes pre-referendum materials from Nigel Farage and the Leave campaigns, particularly Leave.EU, as well as the Remain campaign (355); this is compared with three months of articles and public commentary from the ‘Metro’ newspaper (60 issues), providing insight into context, performance, and contestation. In-depth semi-structured focus groups and interviews with Leave voters (18) and a survey-experiment conducted amongst UK voters (1368) enables identification of both contestation and the effects of blame—specifically how blame makes people feel, and how it makes them feel about a party who is blamed.
This research finds that blame makes villains in politics directly where it engenders negative, ‘villain-type feelings’ towards a blamed party, with annoyance predominant; and indirectly where it engenders compassion for victims. Its effects are mediated by the audience who consume the blame and may be mitigated by contestation strategies employed by that audience or others such as alternative campaigns. These include strategies that engage directly with the blame—counter-blaming, rebuttal, naming and shaming blame—as well as indirectly through use of alternate discursive practices such as credit or threat, and by changing the subjects and objects of blame.
This work exceptionally investigates the effects and contestation of ‘exogenous’ third-party blame, contributing to the fields of international relations, political science, and social psychology; shows that it is not what we ‘are’ but rather what we ‘know’ that circumscribes the effects of blame, defraying concerns over psychometric targeting; provides insight into how communication professionals and EU staff may contest blame, beyond avoiding or shifting it; and demonstrates the effectiveness of blame in creating a villain of the EU in the specific case of the Brexit campaign.
A seemingly never-ending stream of observers claims that the populist emphasis on nationalism, identity, and popular sovereignty undermines international collaboration and contributes to the crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO). Why, then, do populist governments continue to engage in regional and international institutions? This Element unpacks the counter-intuitive inclination towards institutional cooperation in populist foreign policy and discusses its implications for the LIO. Straddling Western and non-Western contexts, it compares the regional cooperation strategies of populist leaders from three continents: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. The study identifies an emerging populist 'script' of regional cooperation based on notions of popular sovereignty. By embedding regional cooperation in their political strategies, populist leaders are able to contest the LIO and established international organisations without having to revert to unilateral nationalism.
The mantra of ‘take back control’ has become a staple of eurosceptics across the European Union. At the centre of the slogan's message is a call to arms against the (perceived) challenge that EU membership represents for national sovereignty. In this paper, we theorize that supranational decisions taken by the European Court of Justice can increase ‘polity scepticism’ – increased opposition to the EU and decreased satisfaction with national democracy – by cueing citizens regarding the effects of EU integration on the perception of diluted sovereignty. Empirically, we leverage quasi-experimental evidence to support our theory, establishing that ECJ rulings have a significant causal effect on euroscepticism and dissatisfaction with democracy. The implications of our findings suggest that EU institutions seeking to ensure compliance with the rule of law and EU norms should proceed with caution. Interventionist action may backfire by increasing scrutiny of the EU's legitimacy and undermining polity support.
International democratic theory suggests that democratic states should act according to certain principles, values and rules. Even if such an approach often depends on circumstances, it should remain their objective, including in international conflicts. Recent literature on parliamentary diplomacy has also illustrated this situation with empirical examples, including in the case of French parliamentary diplomacy. Yet, in the Syrian and Ukrainian conflicts, existing literature shows numerous examples which contravene these accepted standards. In fact, they support anti–democratic regimes instead. In addition, many an academic writing on the subject appears to celebrate such a behaviour. This article will therefore unpack this French puzzle. Its aim is not to criticize the concept or practice of parliamentary diplomacy. Its objective is to highlight why there might exist a “dark side” to French parliamentary diplomacy. A cause for serious concern that has been largely ignored by academics and practitioners to date.
As populist radical right parties muster increasing support in many democracies, an important question is how mainstream parties can recapture their voters. Focusing on Germany, we present original panel evidence that voters supporting the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)—the country’s largest populist radical right party—resemble partisan loyalists with entrenched anti-establishment views, seemingly beyond recapture by mainstream parties. Yet this loyalty does not only reflect anti-establishment voting, but also gridlocked party-issue positioning. Despite descriptive evidence of strong party loyalty, experimental evidence reveals that many AfD voters change allegiances when mainstream parties accommodate their preferences. However, for most parties this repositioning is extremely costly. While mainstream parties can attract populist radical right voters via restrictive immigration policies, they alienate their own voters in doing so. Examining position shifts across issue dimensions, parties, and voter groups, our research demonstrates that, absent significant changes in issue preferences or salience, the status quo is an equilibrium.
Scholars cite right-wing authoritarian and business-elite influences in their explanations of populist mobilization against climate reforms. The Yellow Vest movement in France, initially sparked by opposition to a carbon tax, defies the generalizations offered by scholars, the media, and politicians alike. This populist movement emerged from below rather than from elite sponsorship and was motivated by social justice concerns. Through in-depth interviews with 31 Yellow Vest activists as well as supplementary primary texts and data, I uncover how the activists frame carbon taxation and climate change within their political struggle. The findings are four-fold: 1) the Yellow Vests are concerned about global climate change and feel their anti-climate depictions in the media are rooted in a government strategy to divide and discredit the movement; 2) they view the government’s taxing them in order to fight climate change as corrupt and unfair; 3) they argue that the carbon tax is additionally unjust due to their precarity, which has increased over several decades; 4) they want to fight climate change on their own terms and argue for more direct forms of democracy to equalize decision making. I conclude with a framework for understanding how and why popular movements oppose climate reforms.
This chapter takes a closer look at how populism intends to concretize a shift away
from traditional politics over to political borders reflecting a so-called “new reality.”
The first part examines the present debate on populism by stressing how the high
degree of politicizing, the absence of academic consensus and the myriad definitions
and approaches to populism complicate a clear understanding of this phenomenon.
The second part of this chapter deals with similarities and differences between rightwing
populism and left-wing populism. Using background analyses and speeches
given by Marine Le Pen, leader of National Front (now renamed “National Rally”)
and Jean-Luc M lenchon, leader of the grass-roots movement “Unsubmissive France
(FI),” we show how Le Pen and M lenchon intend to transform traditional political
dividing lines between the left and the right into a new globalist/anti-globalist axis.
Their convergences on certain topics leads to a paradox: even if they share a common
goal of wiping out political benchmarks, their radicalism indicates that the frontier
between left and right has not vanished yet.
Estudio teórico y metodológico para enmarcar la obra desde el punto de vista teórico, de la literatura y de la metodología
The question of whether people voting for Eurosceptic parties in almost every European country is simply a democratic way of expressing a political opinion, or if it presents a threat to democracy by giving a voice to Eurosceptic parties that challenge the EU in a populist manner, has not lost its currency since the 2008 European sovereign dept crisis. In fact, at the first glance, the situation of anti-Corona protestors in Canada or Germany seems comparable. But contrary to some scholars, I argue that it was the economic crisis that first visualized the interdependency of the EU members to the citizens, and was, therefore, the ideal setting for populists to create an atmosphere of mistrust, with the help of the media in some countries. This Research Note addresses the undertheorized link between populism and crisis, by developing a theoretical model focussing on the aggregate level, which shows that EU-membership duration is a crucial factor in explaining voting for Eurosceptic parties. I use data from the European Social Survey and compare a period from 2002 to 2016, conducting trend analysis and difference-in-difference-estimation. My analysis reveals that Eurosceptic parties are more successful in those countries, where anti-EU protest has already been established before. In addition, I find a delayed crisis effect. This could be important for our understanding of the current Covid-19-crisis, which is a health crisis in first place, but a threat to democratic values and instrumentalized by populists as well.
Fitting with a common scheme across European democracies, the last election in Belgium led radical (left and right) parties to increase their vote share. One of the key drivers of the radical vote is political dissatisfaction (Droste 2011). Yet, the latter does not always translate into radical or protest voting behaviors. Using the 2019s RepResent Belgian Elections Study, we show the moderating effect of close social contacts in this relationship. For dissatisfied voters who believe that most contacts are similarly discontent, the probability to vote for radical parties (or, if not, to adopt other protest behaviors) is reinforced. However, the odds decrease the more they perceive their contacts different from themselves, i.e., as politically satisfied voters. Then, they become more likely to avoid protest/radical choices and to vote for institutionalized parties. Overall, our study yields findings showing that voting behaviors should be studied by considering also the voters’ social networks, which seem to exert a role in defining the acceptability of voting choices. What matters is not only how one perceives politics but also how one believes his close contacts perceive politics too.
Are populism and nationalism two inseparable dimensions? The controversial argument is that both exclusionary and inclusionary populism draw on nationalist representations and traditions to construct their political discourse. In the case of Podemos, several scholars have argued that this party presents a nationalistic character based on its invocation of the ‘patria’ and a demarcated, imagined political community. This article relies on an original data set in order to test this hypothesis related to Podemos's supply and demand. With regard to supply, we explore four party manifestos to elucidate how Podemos refers to the nation, Spanish identity, sovereignty and immigration. To evaluate demand, we analyse the party's supporters' political attitudes and values regarding the nation, assimilation of immigrants and national preferentialism. Our results show that Podemos's supporters express lower levels of national identification than the remainder of the population. Similarly, the former analysis reveals a pro‐immigration position and a tendency of the party Podemos to avoid issues related to national identity. Departing from these results, we draw several implications on the use of nationalism for the categorisation of political parties and, in particular, left‐wing populism.
Comparative research looks for “ethnic nationalism” to classify a party as either “extreme right” or “radical right.” “Ethnic nationalism” has turned into a common theoretical concept by way of various interpretations of Hans Kohn's work, developing a theoretical ethnic/civic contrast of national ideologies. The application of this dichotomy has been criticized for lack of theoretical depth that resulted in inaccurate analysis and, in some cases, harmful normative judgment. This article claims that this simple contrast between two types of national ideology omits complex theoretical views of nationalism that are neither civic nor ethnic, which are promoted mainly by the conservative right. By expanding Kohn's dichotomy into an “axis of ideological nationalism,” it offers a normative theoretical tool to be used in comparative politics, paving the way for a more comprehensive model of right-wing national ideology.
The European project has always played a pivotal role in Italy’s politics and Italian political discourse. The European Union (EU) represented the primary vehicle through which to regain international legitimacy. From this perspective, the intensification in the last few years of the Eurosceptic and populist discourse of Matteo Salvini’s Lega has marked a critical turning point. This article contributes to an understanding of such process from critical discursive and historical perspectives. Building on the concept of recontextualization as elaborated in CDS but also more generally appealing to conceptual history and Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) frameworks, this study deconstructs the Lega’s Euroscepticism diachronically, interpreting populism as a key discursive element of the Lega’s Far Right ideology. We thus highlight how the Lega’s Eurosceptic discourse and the recontextualisation of the European legitimisation process present a dramatic change and seem highly indicative of a new ideological and extra-party cleavage of ‘sovereignism’.
There is a body of evidence that suggests a common ground between extremists and ideologies from both sides of the political spectrum. As we will see, extremist individuals have a similar social background and they also have the same psychological mindset. Their ideologies have common structural characteristics and they often go against the same enemies. Thus, we should look at political extremism from an integrative perspective. In sum, there are three major drivers of political extremism: individual needs like anomia, (authoritarian) personality traits, deprivation, value orientations, and lack of political support; ideological narratives from radical or extremist actors that highlight discrepancies between present day distress and future utopian ideas and provide frameworks of meaning that help people interpret the world; and group constraints within the individual’s social network like processes of social and structural transformation, political climate, cultural specifics, unemployment, immigration, and inequality.
Conclusiones de la obra, análisis de los principales hallazgos procedentes de los diferentes casos de estudio
Although populism is a political phenomenon that originated out of Europe and emerged long before the start of European integration, in the post-World War II European context, it has developed in conjunction with Euroscepticism. Actually, since the creation of the European Union (EU) in the early 1990s, the two phenomena have gradually come to coincide. Nowadays, with few exceptions, all populist parties are also Eurosceptic and vice versa. This coincidence, far from being casual, can be explained by the core features of the populist (thin-centred) ideology and by the nature of both the integration process and the EU governance. Indeed, while populism has been commonly defined as an anti-elitist ideology, European integration and the EU system of governance are widely seen as quintessentially elitist. Under these conditions, opposition to/in the EU tends to be inherently populist. Nonetheless, this ‘populist/Eurosceptic compound’ can manifest itself in rather different shapes, depending on the types of populism (inclusive vs. exclusive) and the types of Euroscepticism (hard vs. soft) that are adopted by individual parties. The chapter highlights both conceptual and empirical overlaps between populism and Euroscepticism, also referring to intermediated concepts, such as ‘national sovereignty’ and ‘economic nationalism’, that work as traits d’union between the two phenomena.
Análisis de las ideas de política exterior del Movimento Cinque Stelle en Italia desde sus comienzos, los años en la oposición (2013-2018) y la experiencia en el gobierno de Italia (2018-actualidad)
Ulrich Beck’s sociological analysis outlines that the idea of a cosmopolitan state in civil society form is aimed at imagining and realizing a resilient diversity. Civil society’s agenda surrounds itself with the aura of human rights and global justice and struggles for a new grand narrative of radical-democratic globalization, expressing a ‘cosmopolitan realpolitik’ in an age of global crises and risks. Korzec’s theoretical approach (1993) recognized human rights as a “global religion”, focusing mainly on their institutional dimension. In the ambivalent times of ‘second modernity’, however, the continuing human rights’ violations in the name of religion reveal that the real challenge remains the universal belief in everyone’s right to a dignified and well-protected life.
According to a recent in-depth analysis of the European Parliament (2017), the last two decades the European Union has been confronted with diplomatic crises in which the religious dimension has been key. Referring to the multiple ways in which religion may affect the balance of power at international level, Fox (2006) argues that the religious factor has the dynamics to confer legitimacy to political decisions, to influence the state leaders’ worldviews and shape the environment of policy-making actors, while also allowing religious conflicts to surpass national borders and turn into international issues.
The aim of this paper is to identify the significance of religion as an emerging field in EU foreign policy-making. Within this framework, the main questions addressed focus on the extent to which the geopolitical and societal changes at global scale ‘sensitize’ the EU external policies in religious matters and whether the incorporation of religious dimension at policy level could reinforce the Union’s position as a global actor. Moreover, the analysis constitutes an effort to illuminate the intertwining of religious factor with the fields of diplomacy, conflict resolution and reconciliation processes in an interconnected, cosmopolitan world.
The European Union has gained salience as an issue in political debate. Recent literature shows that successful radical right-wing parties are frequently in opposition to European integration. This article looks at how radical left-wing parties’ positions on EU integration affect their electoral support. It argues that radical left parties can mobilize voters in their favour through positioning in opposition to EU integration because this allows voters to combine their left-wing economic and anti-EU preferences. Using expert and individual-level survey data, this research demonstrates that radical left-wing parties that position themselves against EU integration are more likely to gain individuals’ vote choice. This finding is surprising, given that traditionally radical left-wing parties are defined through their economic, rather than their non-economic, positions. This article demonstrates that variation in positioning around non-economic issues such as EU integration can explain differences in voter support across radical left-wing parties.
Purpose
This paper examines nationalism as a driver of political risk and how it can lead to supply chain disruptions for foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs).
Design/methodology/approach
Conceptual research based on a review of the literature on nationalism and supply chain risk management.
Findings
This research unveils how economic nationalism could engender supply chain disruptions via discriminatory practices toward all foreign MNEs and how national animosity may generate additional risks for the MNEs of nations in conflict with one another. These discriminatory practices include an array of host government and grassroots actions targeting foreign MNEs. While economic nationalism and national animosity emanate from within a host country, they may stimulate geopolitical crises outside the host country and thereby affect the international supply chains of foreign MNEs.
Research limitations/implications
This research lays the foundation for analytical and empirical researchers to integrate key elements of nationalism into their studies and recommends propositions and datasets to study these notions.
Practical implications
This study shows the implications that nationalist drivers of supply chain disruptions have for foreign MNEs and thus can help managers to proactively mitigate such disruptions.
Originality/value
This study reveals the importance of integrating notions of national identity and national history in supply chain research, since they play a key role in the emergence of policies and events responsible for supply chain disruptions.
Recent literature on the centre–periphery debate in European politics has produced a wide range of composite paradigms of regionalism, nationalism, and populism and nativism. A number of these definitions, however, tend to overemphasise the importance of populism by either framing it as a core ideology or by conflating it with the nationalism or regionalism of a specific party. This article makes three innovative contributions to populist studies by sustaining an ideational approach to populism and its combination with regionalist and nationalist ideologies. First, the article addresses the varied and at times conflicting composite paradigms of regionalism, nationalism, and populism by proposing a minimalist ‘populist regionalist’ and ‘populist nationalist’ conceptual framework; this places the emphasis on the type of nationalism and regionalism (left- or right-wing, civic or ethnic) to which populism and (potentially) nativism are attached. Second, by emphasising a clear distinction between populism and nativism, the article adds to a growing field of literature which aims to address the problem of ‘populist hype’. Finally, the contribution of a brief comparative case study illustrates how populism represents a key link between nationalists and regionalists ranging from the far-left to the far-right which are otherwise separated by nativism.
In recent years more and more studies have pointed to the limitations of demand-side explanations of the electoral success of populist radical right parties. They argue that supply-side factors need to be included as well. While previous authors have made these claims on the basis of purely empirical arguments, this article provides a (meta)theoretical argumentation for the importance of supply-side explanations. It takes issue with the dominant view on the populist radical right, which considers it to be alien to mainstream values in contemporary western democracies – the ‘normal pathology thesis’. Instead, it argues that the populist radical right should be seen as a radical interpretation of mainstream values, or more akin to a pathological normalcy. This argument is substantiated on the basis of an empirical analysis of party ideologies and mass attitudes. The proposed paradigmatic shift has profound consequences for the way the populist radical right and western democracy relate, as well as for how the populist radical right is best studied. Most importantly, it makes demand for populist radical right politics rather an assumption than a puzzle, and turns the prime focus of research on to the political struggle over issue saliency and positions, and on to the role of populist radical right parties within these struggles.
This article aims to make a three-fold contribution to the study of Euroscepticism in the wider Europe. First, it presents a two-dimensional conceptualization of party positions on European integration in general, and of Euroscepticism in particular, distinguishing between diffuse and specific support for European integration (i.e. `support for the ideas of European integration' and `support for the EU'). Second, it analyses the location, type, and electoral strength of party-based Euroscepticism in the four candidate countries of East Central Europe - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Third, it contributes to the ideology vs. strategy debate, showing that ideology is the dominant explanation for both types of support, although strategy at times plays a role in explaining specific support.
Contemporary Greek politics are marked by tensions between pressures for reform and the structural constraints to their realisation. The pressures combine those emanating from processes of Europeanisation (European Union agendas on economic reform, for example) and the domestic demand for ‘modernisation' (the agenda of former Premier Simitis). The two have been seen as synonymous in Greece. The resultant tensions have created a fundamental issue of governability: in a number of areas, Greece is une société bloqué. There are systemic weaknesses deriving from the institutional capacity of the state, the regime of ‘disjointed corporatism', and cultural practices of clientelism and ‘rent-seeking'. These constrain agency and leadership strategies. The analysis places the recent Simitis project in an historical context and attempts to delineate patterns of change and continuity. The reform process has been asymmetrical and uncertain in character. The problem of governance remains and, in turn, it questions the nature of Greece's convergence with the EU.
This article presents an overview of the writings on the extreme right party family of the third wave (1980–95). First, the prime criterion for the classification of the party family is discussed. Second, the main critiques of, and alternatives to, the term right‐wing extremism are evaluated. Third, the political parties that are generally considered to be members of the party family are identified. Fourth, subgroups within the larger party family are examined. In the conclusion, the various writings are structured on the basis of four theoretical schools within the broader study of right‐wing extremism.
How is contestation on European integration structured among national political parties? Are issues arising from European integration assimilated into existing dimensions of domestic contestation? We show that there is a strong relationship between the conventional left/right dimension and party positioning on European integration. However, the most powerful source of variation in party support is the new politics dimension, ranging from Green/alternative/libertarian to Traditional/authoritarian/nationalist.
This article summarizes and extends the main lines of theorizing on public opinion on European integration. We test theories of economic calculus and communal identity in a multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer data. Both economic calculus and communal identity are influential, but the latter is stronger than the former. We theorize how the political consequences of identity are contested and shaped - that is to say, politically cued - in national contexts. The more national elites are divided, the more citizens are cued to oppose European integration, and this effect is particularly pronounced among citizens who see themselves as exclusively national. A model that synthesizes economic, identity, and cue theory explains around one-quarter of variation at the individual level and the bulk of variation at the national and party levels.
We make a three-fold contribution to research on the European radical left. First, we will offer a clear and comprehensive definition of the term radical left. Second, we will look at the main developments within the European radical left as a whole, and not just at one sub-set of political parties. Third, we will take a pan-European perspective, focusing on both Eastern and Western Europe. The radical left in Europe post-1989 is both in decline and in mutation. Decline is evident in both the marginalization and moderation of Communist organizations (notably parties), a direct result of the fall of the Soviet Union, and the fissiparous nature of many radical left groupings. But the end of the USSR has also given space for mutation, that is, the emergence of a New Radical Left employing new ideological approaches (principally social-populism) and modern forms of trans-national cooperation (particularly through the European Parliament and the anti-globalization movement). This mutation indicates future potential, however unrealized so far.Comparative European Politics (2005) 3, 2349. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cep.6110052
New structural potentials related to the processes of globalisation and European integration have produced far-reaching changes in the structure of opposition in the French party system. Whereas the newly designed institutions of the Fifth Republic progressively brought about a ‘bipolar multipartism’ in the first two decades of their existence, the rising prominence of new cultural conflicts and of the issue of European integration have led to an increasing disunity of the parties within the left and right, to the emergence of the Front National as a powerful new actor, as well as to a general process of party system fragmentation. On the basis of four electoral campaigns between 1978 and 2002, this article analyses the transformation of the ideological dimensions underlying party competition and the positions of parties within this space, and assesses the implications for the electoral success of parties and for the general make-up of the party system.
The article focuses on the role played by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) in modernizing the Greek party system. After a short reference to the party's history and development, the focus turns to the 1995–2005 period, when the party governed for three consecutive terms. It is argued that PASOK underwent some key changes in its values and programme as it abandoned its pro-state values, its reservations towards the market and its visionary political rhetoric. At the same time, drastic transformations occurred in party organization, whose mass structure was undermined, and the party's style of political communication, which became increasingly based on television and media experts. The analysis concludes that these developments are at the heart of the party's serious challenges following its defeat in the 2004 election.
This research note argues that much of the literature on support for European integration misses the heart of the nature of opposition to this process by ignoring the notion of perceived threat. Essentially, people are hostile toward the European project in great part because of their perceptions of threats posed by other cultures. I analyze this hypothesis by replicating a piece of research that previously appeared in this journal. adding measures of perceived threat to that model. The results support the main contention, which is that perceived cultural threat is an important factor that has been mistakenly ignored in explanations of hostility toward the European Union.
Nationalism was ubiquitous in nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, we know little about what the nation meant to ordinary people. In this book, both renowned historians and younger scholars try to answer this question. This book will appeal to specialists in the field but also offers helpful reading for any college and university course on nationalism.
The Extreme Right in Western Europe is a concise introduction to one of the most persistent facets of late twentieth-century history, politics and society. The legacy of the Nazi era and the increasingly unacceptable face of extremism all militated against the success of far right-wing parties after World War Two. Nevertheless, contemporary problems and the solutions offered to ever more difficult questions such as immigration, unemployment, and law and order have enabled extremist, nationalist and populist movements to emerge. Focusing on a range of countries including France, Italy, Germany, the UK, Austria, Belgium and the Mediterranean region, Paul Hainsworth: • explores the concept of right-wing extremism • discusses the varying success of extreme right political parties in Western Europe • examines the policies and perspectives of these parties • analyses the profile of the extreme right's electorate • assesses the impact of right-wing extremism on aspects of politics in contemporary Western Europe. This accessible and up-to-date analysis of this enduring movement in Western Europe is a must for courses in history, politics and European studies.
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization 'winners' and 'losers' is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
We test competing explanations for party positioning on the issue of European integration over the period 1984 to 1996 and find that the ideological location of a party in a party family is a powerful predictor of its position on this issue. Party family is a stronger influence than strategic competition, national location, participation in government, or the position of a party's supporters. We conclude that political parties have bounded rationalities that shape how they process incentives in competitive party systems. Political cleavages give rise to ideological commitments or "prisms" through which political parties respond to new issues, including European integration.
Paper prepared for the UNC workshop on European integration and party system change, April 22-23, 2004. Please do not quote. This is an early draft for limited circulation. Comments welcome.
This book covers some essential topics of econometrics. It covers from single regression to multiple regression. The second part of the book talks about how to detect a violation of assumptions (multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity, autocorrelation, model specification) made for running multiple regression and what the remedies are. The third part deals with three topics, including (a) regression on dummy variables, (b) regression on dummy dependent variables, (c) autoregressive and distributed lag models. The last part deals with simultaneous-equation model.
How does the ideological profile of a political party affect its support or opposition to European integration? The authors investigate this question with a new expert data set on party positioning on European integration covering 171 political parties in 23 countries. The authors’ findings are (a) that basic structures of party competition in the East and West are fundamentally and explicably different and (b) that although the positions that parties in the East and West take on European integration are substantively different, they share a single underlying causality.
This article posits that national identity is an important element in explaining attitudes towards the European Union. A model of support for European integration is developed that suggests that feelings of national identity are highly important in an individual's choice to support the EU. The impacts of three alternative conceptualizations of national identity are tested. These relate to national identity as an intensity of feelings towards one's country, the level of attachment to the nation and other territorial entities, and the fear of other identities and cultures encroaching on the dominant national culture. The results of ordered logit analyses confirm that stronger feelings of national identity lead to lower levels of support for the EU.
Despite the fact that the catch-all thesis has profoundly affected scholarship on political parties, operationalizing the thesis and applying it to evaluate empirical cases has proven a challenge for scholars. While the thesis contains valuable observations of changes that began to take shape in postwar political party systems across Western Europe speculating about the implications of those, it has been widely criticized for lacking a theoretical framework for analysis and clear causal logic. Therefore, while it is often cited it is rarely tested. This article attempts to develop a model of the Kirchheimer thesis that can be applied to case analysis enabling it to be tested empirically. It then tests the model in the case of France, one of the original cases cited by Kirchheimer in his observations. The French case provides an especially interesting laboratory for testing the Kirchheimer thesis, as it clearly exhibits evidence of the type of catch-all convergence that Kirchheimer anticipated alongside elements of party polarization and the persistence of ideology that he would not have expected. Since 1997, the gauche plurielle coalition of Communists, Greens and Socialists has provided some convergence on the left, while the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire emerged prior to the 2002 elections bringing together several parties on the right. At the same time, polarization is evident and small parties appear to persist precisely by delineating their ideological positions. Findings suggest confirmation of the catch-all thesis prediction regarding bipolarization, yet not according the rationale asserted in the thesis. Presidentialization effects prove important explanatory factors. The 2007 elections suggest a possible catch-all party in the UMP. The Bayrou challenge had little effect and the UMP outpaced the center rival, as well as the PS for its second parliamentary majority since 2002.
Scandinavian party competition has incorporated divisions over European integration to a greater degree than most West European party systems, but with considerable variation in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. From a comparative politics perspective this raises questions about the relatively high salience of Euro‐scepticism in Scandinavian politics, the differences between the three cases and changes over time. The central argument in this article is that Europeanisation of party politics ‐ the translation of issues related to European integration into domestic party politics ‐ is driven by the dynamics of long‐ and short‐term government‐opposition competition, and the key driver of change is party strategy. Whether at the centre or extremes of the party system, Euro‐scepticism is a product of party competition — and is, both in its origins and development, ‘the politics of opposition ‘.
This article revisits the age-old debate about elite—mass linkages in the European Union (EU) by examining the way in which political contexts shape individual differentiation in Euroscepticism. We argue that the growing uncertainties about the future of European integration among national publics are increasingly politicized by Eurosceptical elites on both the extreme right and left of the political spectrum. To analyse the cueing effects of these extremist parties, we employ a two-level hierarchical linear model which combines individual-level and contextual data. We show that Eurosceptic cues are, indeed, found on both extremes, but for different reasons. Whereas right-wing extremist parties oppose European integration with the defence of `national sovereignty' and successfully mobilize national identity considerations against the EU, left-wing extremist parties resist further integration in Europe on the basis of the neoliberal character of the project and effectively cue voters against the EU on the basis of economic insecurity arguments.
Greek political parties have proved their ability to survive and to overcome political crises. The performance of the party system during the last 30 years confirms the argument that the third Greek Republic is a consolidated democratic regime and leads to a general consensus about the viability of democracy. However, there is no agreement about the quality of democracy, the nature of the party system, its specific characteristics and the political – ideological as well as the analytical – classification of the political parties. Moreover, the analytical tools and the theoretical schemes employed in the study of Greek politics vary, thus providing the basis for a discussion with both theoretical and practical implications. The following pages seek to pinpoint the major issues in the study of Greek party politics and to assess the usefulness of the concepts and the validity of the arguments developed during the last 30 years. The aim is twofold: first to reassess the concepts and ideas that have dominated the study of modern Greek politics and second to present the cultural and political context within which political parties operate and to discuss the possible future developments. Thus, we may be able to reach some tentative conclusions about the party system, which, as most party systems, undergoes significant change, yet retains remarkable continuity.
The analysis of policy-based party;;competition will not make serious progress beyond the constraints of (a) the unitary actor assumption and (b) a static approach to analyzing party competition between elections until a method is available for deriving; reliable and valid time-series estimates of the policy positions of large numbers of political actors. Retrospective estimation of these positions;In past party systems will require a method for estimating policy positions from political texts. Previous hand-coding content analysis schemes deal with policy emphasis rather than policy positions. We propose a new hand-coding scheme for policy positions, together with a new English language computer,coding scheme that is compatible with this. We apply both schemes; to party manifestos from Britain and Ireland in 1992 and 1997 and cross validate the resulting estimates with :those derived from quite independent expert surveys and with previous,manifesto analyses. There is a high degree of cross validation between coding methods. including computer coding. This implies that it is indeed possible to use computer-coded content analysis to derive reliable and valid estimates of policy positions from political texts. This will allow vast Volumes of text to be coded, including texts generated by individuals and other internal party actors, allowing the empirical elaboration of dynamic rather than static models of party competition that move beyond the unitary actor assumption.
The Nouvelle Droite (ND) was an intellectual movement that emerged from the failures of extreme right politics in 1960s and sought to recontextualize ideology in a manner which avoided overt fascist-Nazi identification. From the later 1970s, one ND strand, the Club de l'Horloge, pursued a national-liberal programme at odds with the Groupement de Recherche et d'Études pour la Civilisation Européenne's (GRECE) pan-Europeanism and opposition to the homogenizing dynamic of neo-liberalism. Nevertheless, both groups continued to share an ideological core: the defence of collective identities and a refusal of egalitarianism. For reasons that mixed an already existing commonality of discourse with strategic and political concerns, leading ND ideologues came to join the Front National (FN) in the 1980s, constituting a powerful party faction, which acted as a conduit for the passing of key ND concepts into FN ideology and policy.French Politics (2006) 4, 158-178. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200099
There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed “socialist patriotism,” a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception.