No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Walking the Tightrope: Populist Radical Right Parties’ Framing of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ Migrants in Belgium and Switzerland
... You don't all need to agree. You need to listen and find out what people think (SVP M57) Related to this more people-centred aspect of legitimacy, another frequently mentioned factor was the need for the SVP to overcome stigmatisation (Sijstermans and Favero 2022). Many members felt stigmatised for the expression of their ideological views. ...
While the literature has widely explored the organisational strategies of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) on the fringes, little is known about the grassroots activism of mainstream PRRPs. We focus on the Italian League and the Swiss People's Party (SVP), two mainstream PRRPs that have a long pedigree of government experience, to investigate if, how and why they invest in extensive activities at the local level to reach the public, despite their pivotal position in the national political scene. Methodologically, we rely on 120 interviews with members and representatives of these two PRRPs to identify the key grassroots activities they carry out at the local level and their perceived goals. The analysis reveals that despite their mainstream status, both the League and SVP still perceive to suffer from stigmatisation and demonisation, as they are not fully accepted as legitimate actors by the public. For this reason, they engage in grassroots activities and activism at the local level, the one closest to the everyday life and concerns of ordinary citizens. Grassroots activism aims to improve the legitimacy of PRRPs, by delivering the idea that their members and activists are normal people committed to help the local communities and not extremists.
... Strijbis, 2014, but also that their preferential votes are driven mainly by considerations on specific policy issues such as socio-economic (in)equality (see also Camatarri et al., 2022). The contribution by Sijstermans and Favero (2022) reverses this individual-level perspective by examining how immigrants are portrayed in parties' public discourses, focusing on two cases of so-called populist radical right parties (PRRP): the Belgian Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest, VB) and the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People's Party, SVP). Based on in-depth interviews with representatives and members of both political organizations, the authors find that each of them tends to draw a line between 'good' (and thus acceptable) and 'bad' (and thus to-be-excluded) migrants and that such categorization relies quite systematically on specific rhetorical tools such as doublespeak and euphemism. ...
Alongside pressing issues of cultural, social, and economic inclusion, the question of migrants as political agents has emerged as one of utmost importance in public debates worldwide. Interestingly, in Political Science literature, this topic has been widely explored by categorizing internationally mobile citizens as either immigrants or emigrants. This Special Issue aims to unravel the complex dynamics of political participation across national borders by simultaneously analyzing both dimensions. This involves examining mobile citizens as political agents in the 'host' country and as individuals who often retain political rights in their home country, granting them a 'double' status. This dual status often enables them to claim interests in both arenas, necessitating renewed theoretical, analytical, and empirical efforts for thorough analysis.
As they become more successful, populist radical right parties face a tension between keeping their nativist credentials and moderating their appeal to gain new voters. We argue that differentiating party messages to core supporters and the wider electorate allows parties to pursue both goals. We outline and empirically illustrate the previously underexplored phenomenon of selective messaging based on the communication strategy of the Hungarian Jobbik party throughout its lifespan (2006–19) in partisan outlets, press releases and Facebook. Using a dictionary approach, we map the co-evolution of populist and nativist mobilization under conditions of supply- and demand-side changes. Our results show the decline and transformation of Jobbik's nativist appeal, and an increasing reliance on populism. The trend is not uniform; Jobbik relies on nativism as a function of targeting party identifiers or the general electorate in specific media outlets. Our findings show the importance of mapping parties’ programmatic appeal across platforms and over time.
More and more Western European radical right-wing populist parties participate in the governments of their respective countries. At least some of these parties moderate—that is, become less radical—once they join the government; others, however, do not. Although the literature has addressed such moderation, the conditions that lead to it have not been analyzed comprehensively. In this paper, we use a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA, N = 14) to determine what conditions are consistently associated with moderation across cases. We find that the degree of governmental responsibility a party takes over is as important as its internal dynamic. In a ruling coalition, compromises must be found, which can create high internal tensions within the radical right-wing populist party. Joining government can thus have its price: a crisis of party identity and a strong compulsion to moderate.
This article provides a comparative conclusion to the thematic issue on the organisational characteristics of 12 right-wing populist parties (RWPPs) across Europe. We observe that many RWPPs—at least partially—adopt features of the mass party model. This finding illustrates the ideological aspects behind organisational choices: For populist parties, in particular, it is important to signal societal rootedness and “closeness to the people.” It furthermore challenges the idea that there is a one-way teleological movement towards more lean, electoral-professional kinds of party organisation. At the same time, the case studies clearly illustrate that RWPP leaders and executives continue to exercise great power over their members, who are essentially offered “participation without power.”
The Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei [SVP]) has increased its territorial extensiveness and organisational intensiveness in recent years, and has professionalised its strategies of communication. This article analyses the dynamics characterising the SVP’s organisation. It shows that with its locally rooted presence and its effort to generate ideological coherence, the party has embraced the “mass party” organisational model. It additionally assesses the extent to which the SVP’s centralised power at the federal level is conducive to the party’s further electoral success. Having considered both the party at national level and three of its most important cantonal branches, the article argues that the organisational dominance of the SVP’s central leadership was beneficial for the party’s electoral strength but will lead to tensions with cantonal and local branches, which are largely in charge, to build and maintain an active base.
Research has demonstrated that resentful emotions toward the politics and perceptions of being culturally and economically threatened by immigration increase support for populist parties in some European countries, and that macro-level economic conditions engender those perceptions and emotions and increase populist support. This article reveals that household-level economic conditions also affect perceptions of cultural and economic threat by immigrants. Low- and middle-income populations are more vulnerable to suffer economic distress due to macro-level factors such as import shock, which can increase their resentment toward democracy, and their perceptions that immigration is a cultural and economic threat, therefore increasing the likelihood to vote for populist parties. A mediation analysis using the European Social Survey data from 2002 to 2018 provides evidence for the argument.
Existing ideational approaches to nativism tend to conflate the concept with nationalism, xenophobia and populism, as well as overlooking the role of racism and racialisation in the process of constructing the non-native ‘out-group’, against the native ‘in-group’. Inspired by the Discourse Theoretical approach to populism, this article offers a significant conceptual contribution to studies on the far right by interpreting nativism as a racist and xenophobic discourse structured around an exclusionary vision of the nation. This conceptualisation helps identify how xenophobia, nationalism, racism and racialisation all contribute to nativist discourse, how nativism can be clearly demarcated from populism, and how nativist arguments can be articulated by parties beyond the far right.
The study of far-right parties and politics is one of the most high-profile research areas in political science and related disciplines. Far-right parties have been the subject of vast amounts of varied scholarship since their turn-of-the-century resurgence. However, as the far right has become a mainstay, with Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 blurring the boundaries between mainstream and far-right politics, it has become crucial to pay attention to the process of mainstreaming. Beyond a focus on far-right electoral success, studies of mainstreaming, as well as a critical account of the concept and role of the ‘mainstream’, have proved elusive. This article provides a heuristic framework to understand these concepts and the mainstreaming of the far right. Key to our approach is a more holistic analysis, extending beyond traditional approaches which focus mostly on the electoral outcomes of far-right parties, positioning the mainstream as a relatively inert target or bulwark against them. To achieve this, we seek to reframe the focus towards the centrality of discourse both in the process, and as an outcome, of mainstreaming. Only by doing so can we account for the significant role played by the mainstream in this process.
Exclusionary populism is well known for twisting real grievances of the citizens, by problematizing the gap between “us” and “them”, capitalizing on identity lines, calling out as “others” those who do not share “pure people’s” identity and culture. Especially after 9/11, Muslims have become the ideal-type of “other”, making Islamophobia the primary populist anti-paradigm. This article contributes to the burgeoning literature on Islamophobic populism analyzing the presence of Islamophobia in the electoral discourse of Vox party in Spain and Lega in Italy. In addition, it makes a novel contribution by discussing and testing the existence of different models of Islamophobia, distinguishing between “banal Islamophobia” and “ontological Islamophobia”. Applying clause-based semantic text analysis—including qualitative and quantitative variables—to thirty speeches by the two party leaders, Santiago Abascal and Matteo Salvini, during the last three elections (General, Regional and European), the paper concludes that, despite the similarities, the two politician display two different models of Islamophobia. Whereas Abascal displays a clear “ontological Islamophobia”, depicting Muslims ontologically incompatible with Spanish civilization (defined precisely by its anti-Muslim history), the latter presents a mix of arguments that oscillate between “ontological” and “banal” Islamophobia.
The term 'illiberal democracy', coined by Fareed Zakaria in 1997, has gained much traction, specifically since its use by Hungarian Prime Minster Victor Orbán in 2014. Ever since, Orbán and his governing party Fidesz have been implementing this vision resulting in major cutdowns on free speech, freedom of press, of various NGOs which support human rights, and so forth. Moreover, Fidesz won the 2018 national election with a strong focus on antiimmigration policies. Although Orbán's restrictive migration policies were widely criticised during the so-called refugee crisis 2015, many EU member states have started to follow the Hungarian policy of closing borders and protecting the EU from asylum-seekers and an alleged invasion by Muslims. Hence, I claim that formerly taboo subjects and expressions in mainstream discourse are being accepted more and more ('normalisation'). Such normalisation goes hand in hand with a certain 'shamelessness': the limits of the sayable are shifting regarding both the frequency of lies and the violating of discourse conventions – as well as regarding repeated attacks on central democratic institutions. Normalising the assessment of migrants as a threat to inner security and a burden on the welfare state and education system must be perceived as an international development – generally instrumentalising a 'politics of fear'.
Digital media play an important role in the contemporary rise in visibility of New Right and far-right activist groups online, offline, and in the mainstream media. This visibility has boosted their online and offline mobilization power. Through a live digital ethnographic analysis of the rise of Schild & Vrienden, a recent Flemish far-right activist movement, I will argue that we should understand their online and offline activism as part of a “metapolitical battle” exploiting the affordances of digital media in a hybrid media system. Schild & Vrienden, just like most contemporary New Right movements, draws ideological and strategic inspiration from “ La Nouvelle Droite,” the French far-right school of thought. Following their lead, these activists focus first and foremost on the circulation and the normalization of ideas: the discursive or metapolitical battle for hegemony. Digital media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube prove to be ideal platforms for that metapolitical battle enabling them to gain considerable discursive power in a hybrid media system. This article argues that the distribution of New Right content on these platforms presupposes digital literacy and algorithmic activism. “Algorithmic activists” are defined as activists who use (theoretical or practical) knowledge about the relative weight certain signals have within the proceduralized choices the algorithms of the media platforms make as proxies of human judgment, to reach their (meta)political goals. In this sense, “algorithmic activism” contributes to spreading their message by interacting with the post to trigger the algorithms of the medium, so that they boost the popularity rankings.
Previous research has predominantly measured populist attitudes as a one-dimensional concept, tapping into the distinction between the ordinary people and the culprit elites. With growing differentiation of populist viewpoints across the globe, this unidimensional approach may not reflect the multifaceted reality of the people’s populism. Most importantly, albeit paramount in right-wing populist rhetoric, exclusionist perceptions of others threatening the monocultural nation of the people are typically not captured in one-dimensional conceptualizations. To assess more precisely how populist attitudes are structured, we collected original survey data (N = 809) among a representative sample of Dutch citizens. Using Multidimensional Scaling and Confirmatory Factor Analysis, we propose a two-dimensional structure: anti-establishment and exclusionism. This study further demonstrates how salient these different populist attitudes are among which voters.
This paper engages in a comparative analysis of the economic positions of radical right‐wing populist parties in Western Europe. Following Ennser‐Jedenastik (2016), we argue that those parties' political economy is best captured in terms of the nativist, populist and authoritarian features of their core ideology, each of which produces a specific set of economic policies independent from the issue of government intervention in the economy. On basis of an analysis of the election manifestos of seven radical right‐wing populist parties in Western Europe in the period 2005‐2015, we argue that those parties share similarities in their economic nativism, authoritarianism and populism, whilst their positions on the traditional role of the state in the economy are more diverse. The findings indicate also a unified ‘nativist’ response to the global financial crisis both in terms of welfare chauvinism and economic protectionism. We discuss the role of internal and external factors in explaining the economic profile of radical right‐wing populist parties.
This article formulates precise questions and ‘rules of engagement’ designed to advance our understanding of the role populism can and should play in the present political conjuncture, with potentially significant implications for critical management and organization studies and beyond. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and others working within the post-Marxist discourse-theory tradition, we defend a concept of populism understood as a form of reason that centres around a claim to represent ‘the people’, discursively constructed as an underdog in opposition to an illegitimate ‘elite’. A formal discursive approach to populism brings with it important advantages. For example, it establishes that a populist logic can be invoked to further very different political goals, from radical left to right, or from progressive to regressive. It sharpens too our grasp of important issues that are otherwise conflated and obfuscated. For instance, it helps us separate out the nativist and populist dimensions in the discourses of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), Trump or the Front National (FN). Our approach to populism, however, also points to the need to engage with the rhetoric about populism, a largely ignored area of critical research. In approaching populism as a signifier, not only as a concept, we stress the added need to focus on the uses of the term ‘populism’ itself: how it is invoked, by whom and to what purpose and effect. This, we argue, requires that we pay more systematic attention to anti-populism and ‘populist hype’, and reflect upon academia’s own relation to populism and anti-populism.
Populism, particularly in its radical right-wing variants, is often posited as antithetical to the principles of liberalism. Yet a number of contemporary cases of populist radical right parties from Northern Europe complicate this characterisation of populism: rather than being directly opposed to liberalism, these parties selectively reconfigure traditionally liberal defences of discriminated-against groups—such as homosexuals or women—in their own image, positing these groups as part of ‘the people’ who must be protected, and presenting themselves as defenders of liberty, free speech and ‘Enlightenment values’. This article examines this situation, and argues that that while populist radical right parties in Northern Europe may only invoke such liberal values to opportunistically attack their enemies—in many of these cases, Muslims and ‘the elite’ who allegedly are abetting the ‘Islamisation’ of Europe’—this discursive shift represents a move towards a ‘liberal illiberalism’. Drawing on party manifestoes and press materials, it outlines the ways in which these actors articulate liberal illiberalism, the reasons they do so, and the ramifications of this shift.
Populist right-wing politics is moving centre-stage, with some parties reaching the very top of the electoral ladder: but do we know why, and why now?
In this book Ruth Wodak traces the trajectories of such parties from the margins of the political landscape to its centre, to understand and explain how they are transforming from fringe voices to persuasive political actors who set the agenda and frame media debates. Laying bare the normalization of nationalistic, xenophobic, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, she builds a new framework for this ‘politics of fear’ that is entrenching new social divides of nation, gender and body.
The result reveals the micro-politics of right-wing populism: how discourses, genres, images and texts are performed and manipulated in both formal and also everyday contexts with profound consequences. This book is a must-read for scholars and students of linguistics, media and politics wishing to understand these dynamics that are re-shaping our political space.
An analysis was conducted of the discourse of Nick Griffin (leader of the BNP, the far right-wing British National Party), as featured on a television debate, broadcast on the popular BBC current affairs program Question Time (22 October 2009). On the basis of equivocation theory (Bavelas et al. 1990), it was hypothesized that Griffin's discourse may be seen to reflect an underlying communicative conflict. On the one hand, to be seen as racist is widely regarded as reprehensible in contemporary British society; on the other hand, much of the BNP's political support comes from its anti-immigrant stance. In this context, it was proposed that while Griffin denies criticisms that characterize the BNP as anti-immigrant or racist, he puts over his political message through implicit meanings, seemingly vague and ambiguous, but which carry clear implications regarding the BNP's continued underlying anti-immigrant stance. These implicit messages were further conceptualized as a form of “doublespeak” – language that deliberately disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words, and which may be characterized as a form of “calculated ambivalence.”
Populist Right-Wing Parties (PRWPs) have made a remarkable comeback since the 1980s, especially in Western Europe. In this paper we argue that in order to explain such successes we need to understand the creative way in which PRWP leaders frame the collective past, present and future. We examined speeches of PRWP leaders in France, The Netherlands, and Belgium and examined in each of these unique contexts how these leaders instill collective nostalgia and perceptions of discontinuity between past and present to justify a tougher stance on immigration, asylum-seeking and multiculturalism. We found that these PRWP leaders use temporal narratives about history and identity to persuade their audience that (a) our past is glorious, our future is bleak, (b) we know who brought the country down, (c) we were once glorious because we were tough, (d) we need to be tough once more, and (e) we are the only party prepared to take on “the enemy”. We conclude that PRWP leaders not only feed collective angst and fear of losing collective roots, they also provide (potential) followers with a historicized justification for harsher treatment of migrants and minorities, arguing that history has shown that the nation's survival depends on its ability to be unflinching.
This article examines the relationship between nationalism and liberal values, and more specifically the redefinition of boundaries between national communities and others in the rhetoric of radical right parties in Europe. The aim is to examine the tension between radical right party discourse and the increasing need to shape this discourse in liberal terms. We argue that the radical right parties that successfully operate within the democratic system tend to be those best able to tailor their discourse to the liberal and civic characteristics of national identity so as to present themselves and their ideologies as the true authentic defenders of the nation's unique reputation for democracy, diversity and tolerance. Comparing the success of a number of European radical right parties ranging from the most electorally successful SVP to the more mixed BNP, FN and NPD, we show that the parties that effectively deploy the symbolic resources of national identity through a predominantly voluntaristic prism tend to be the ones that fare better within their respective political systems. In doing so, we challenge the conventional view in the study of nationalism which expects civic values to shield countries from radicalism and extremism.
.
The enduring electoral success of populist parties across Europe and the increasing opportunities they have gained to access government in recent years bring once more into relief the question of whether populism and democracy are fully compatible. In this article we show how, despite playing different roles in government within very different political systems, and despite the numerous constraints placed upon them (for instance, EU membership, international law and domestic checks and balances), populist parties consistently pursued policies that clashed with fundamental tenets of liberal democracy. In particular, the idea that the power of the majority must be limited and restrained, the sanctity of individual rights and the principle of the division of powers have all come under threat in contemporary Europe. This has contributed to the continuing erosion of the liberal consensus, which has provided one of the fundamental foundations of the European project from its start.
Anti-immigration parties have experienced electoral lift-off in most Western democracies, although the consequences of their victories for real-life policy outcomes have remained largely unexplored. A key question is: do electoral pressures from anti-immigration parties have a ‘contagion’ impact on other parties’ immigration policy positions? In this article, I argue and empirically demonstrate that this is the case. On the basis of a comparative-empirical study of 75 parties in 11 Western European countries, I conclude that this contagion effect involves entire party systems rather than the mainstream right only. In addition, I find that opposition parties are more vulnerable to this contagion effect than parties in government. The findings of this article imply that anti-immigration parties are able to influence policy output in their political systems without entering government.
Welfare states treat different groups of needy people differently. Such differential rationing may reflect various considerations of policymakers, who act in economic, political and cultural contexts. This article aims at contributing to a theoretical and empirical understanding of the popular cultural context of welfare rationing. It examines European public perceptions of the relative deservingness of four needy groups (elderly people, sick and disabled people, unemployed people, and immigrants). Hypotheses, deduced from a literature review, are tested against data from the 1999/2000 European Values Study survey. It is found that Europeans share a common and fundamental deservingness culture: across countries and social categories there is a consistent pattern that elderly people are seen as most deserving, closely followed by sick and disabled people; unemployed people are seen as less deserving still, and immigrants as least deserving of all. Conditionality is greater in poorer countries, in countries with lower unemployment, and in countries where people have less trust in fellow citizens and in state institutions. At the national level there is no relation with welfare regime type or welfare spending. Individual differences in conditionality are determined by several socio-demographic and attitudinal characteristics, as well as by certain features of the country people live in.
Since the 1980s, a growing number of radical right‐wing populist parties have managed to establish themselves permanently in the party systems of advanced liberal capitalist democracies. Initially dismissed as ephemeral reflections of a general debasement of politics in recent years, they represent today one of the most serious challenges to liberal democracy in Western Europe and elsewhere. Unlike the traditional postwar radical right, the contemporary populist right has developed an ideology that, albeit fundamentally anti‐liberal, is compatible with the basic formal principles of democracy. Radical right‐wing populist ideology is anti‐elitist, appealing instead to the common sense of ordinary people; exclusionary, appealing to the right to cultural diversity and identity; and openly discriminatory, appealing to the right to ‘national preference’. The larger goal behind the radical right‐wing populist political project is to halt and reverse the erosion of the established patterns of ethnic political and cultural dominance.
The popular press is supposed to display more sympathy for populist parties. This article investigates whether popular newspapers have a stronger tendency than serious newspapers to share the anti-establishment position of populist parties. It also tests the assumption that populist parties and the popular press share a tendency to personalize politics. The popular press in Britain and in the Netherlands are compared. The focus is on the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) and the Dutch newspaper the Telegraaf, and the British National Party (BNP) and The Sun. The analysis shows that the popular newspapers do not have an anti-elite bias. The Telegraaf and The Sun are overall even more oriented towards elitist perspectives than the quality press. The personalization thesis is not confirmed either. The results throw into doubt whether there is a single tabloid-quality spectrum based on subject matter or political orientation: subject matter and political orientation should not be conflated with differences in style.
For the past decade, populist left- and right-wing parties have been on the rise in Europe. Yet, there are only a few studies on the internal organizational dynamics of these parties. Drawing on a new and unique data from fieldwork observations and interviews with party members from the Alternative for Germany (AfD), this article examines the internal democratic mechanisms in policy formation. The AfD displays a high degree of internal participation – an important but contrasting addition to the comparative research on radical right parties, which fail to sustain a democratic internal organization and consistently adopt mechanisms to centralize power in the leadership. The findings from this field research suggest that populist parties may actually engage in meaningful intra-party democracy and internal deliberative practices to invigorate the connections between citizens and their party representatives.
While the study of populism has typically focused on the national level, recent years have seen a growing body of research on populism’s local dimensions. Despite making important scholarly advances, this ‘localist turn’ has yet to develop a systematic account of how populism intersects with localism. In this research note, we broach this gap. By exploring how right‐ and left‐wing populisms conceptualize the ‘local’, as well as how localist sentiments can heighten or diminish the appeal of right and left populist politics, we establish a general framework to guide future inquiry into local manifestations of populist politics.
Previous studies of right-wing populist (RWP) parties primarily investigate how domestic factors as well as external forces, such as immigration, incite the emergence and electoral success of RWP parties. Studies examining the link between migration and far-right support have found mixed empirical results, using various measures of immigration. In this article, we construct our own measures of immigration that highlight the economic and cultural dimensions of migrant-sending states in relation to migrant-receiving states. Our empirical analysis of 15 Western European countries uses these measures to examine whether the economic and cultural characteristics of migrant-sending states can enhance RWP success in wealthy, advanced democracies. We find some evidence that relatively large economic and cultural differences between natives and immigrants are conducive to RWP support in Western European countries. But the findings suggest that future research should identify and examine other factors that strengthen or undermine the extent to which RWP parties can make electoral gains by focusing on immigration.
In an era of free movement UK employers have had ready access to a supply of labour from the European Union to fill low-skilled jobs. This has enabled them to adopt business models, operating within broader supply chains, that take advantage of this source of labour and the flexibility that many migrant workers – especially those who are new arrivals to the UK – are prepared to offer them. Drawing mainly on evidence from employers on the role of migrant workers in selected sectors with a substantial proportion of low-skilled jobs, this article explores the challenges and opportunities they face in transitioning to a new post-Brexit immigration regime.
Contemporary radical right-wing populism is an ideational compound of anti-elite populism and nativism, the latter encapsulated in the notion that ‘the own people’ should come first. Like populism, nativism has proven to be a rather elusive concept, particularly when it comes to its relationship to related concepts, such as patriotism, nationalism and particularly racism. Originally developed to analyse anti-immigrant sentiments in the United States and Canada, the term ‘nativism’ has recently been increasingly used to understand the success of the radical populist right in Europe and elsewhere. In this article, Betz present three facets of nativism: economic nativism, centred on the notion that jobs should be reserved for native citizens; welfare chauvinism, based on the notion that native citizens should be accorded absolute priority when it comes to social benefits; and symbolic nativism, advancing the notion that government should do everything to defend the cultural identity of a given national society. Whereas, in the past, economic considerations, including concerns about the viability of the welfare state, were central to anti-immigrant sentiment, in recent years, symbolic nativism, grounded in a defence of national cultural identity, is central to the success of radical right-wing populist mobilization. © 2019
Part of the literature identifies the core constituency of radical right parties (RRPs) in the so-called “modernization losers”. But while analysing the social bloc supporting RRPs, the literature often treats the matter as a monolithic bloc rather than focusing on the different expectations of such a heterogeneous electorate. Our findings indicate that political attitudes and other social characteristics influence the voting behaviour in different ways depending on the voter’s social backgrounds. Our study indicates that while cultural nativism is a common trait of the RR electorate, economic nativism is a significant predictor only for small-business owners and production workers. Our results also indicate also that the significance of Euroscepticism and political distrust as predictors of a RR vote varies across social backgrounds. We conclude by highlighting the need for further research to differentiate within the RR electorate.
How do radical right populist parties influence government policies in their core issue of immigration? This article provides a systematic analysis of the direct and indirect effects of radical right anti-immigration parties on migration policy reforms in 17 West European countries from 1990 to 2014. Insights from migration policy theory serve to explain variations in the migration policy success of the radical right. While previous studies mostly treat migration policy as uniform, it is argued that this approach neglects the distinct political logics of immigration and integration policy. This article reveals significant variations in policy success by policy area. While immigration policies have become more liberal despite the electoral success of the radical right, when the radical right is in government office it enacts more restrictions in integration policies. Accordingly, anti-immigrant mobilisation is more likely to influence immigrants’ rights than their actual numbers.
Immigration has become a hot topic in West European politics. The factors responsible for the intensification of political conflict on this issue are a matter of considerable controversy. This holds in particular for the role of socio-economic factors and of radical right populist parties. This article explores the politicization of immigration issues and its driving forces in the electoral arena. It is based on a comparative study using both media and manifesto data covering six West European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK) for a period from the early 1990s until 2017. We find no association between socio-economic factors and levels of politicization. Political conflict over immigration follows a political logic and must be attributed to parties and party competition rather than to ‘objective pressures.’ More specifically, we provide evidence that the issue entrepreneurship of radical right populist parties plays a crucial role in explaining variation in the politicization of immigration.
Will the rising share of ethnic minorities in western societies spark a backlash or lead to greater acceptance of diversity? This paper examines this question through the prism of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the most successful populist right party in British history. The paper contributes to work on contextual effects by arguing that ethnic levels and changes cross-pressure white opinion and voting. It argues that high levels of established ethnic minorities reduce opposition to immigration and support for UKIP among White Britons. Conversely, more rapid ethnic changes increase opposition to immigration and support for UKIP. Longitudinal data demonstrates that these effects are not produced by self-selection. The data further illustrate that with time, diversity levels increase their threat-reducing power while the threatening effects of ethnic change fade. Results suggest that the contextual effects literature needs to routinely unpack levels from changes. This also suggests that if the pace of immigration slows, immigration attitudes should soften and populist right voting decline.
Revisiting the trend of identifying populism with extreme right parties, in this paper we aim to problematize such associations within the context of today’s Europe. Drawing on examples from relevant parties in France and the Netherlands, and applying a discourse-theoretical methodology, we test the hypothesis that such parties are better categorized primarily as nationalist and only secondarily – and reluctantly – as ‘populist’. Our hypothesis follows the remarks of scholars who have stressed that the central theme in the discourse of such parties is not the staging of an antagonism between a ‘people’ and an ‘elite’, but rather the opposition of an ethnic community with its alleged dangerous ‘others’. In this context, we propose a discursive methodology able to differentiate between ‘populist’ and ‘nationalist’ (xenophobic, racist, etc.) discourses by locating the core signifiers in each discourse in relation to peripheral ones, as well as by clarifying the nature of the axial antagonisms put forth.
In this paper, I explore how British migrants in Singapore utilise the term ‘expatriate’ to denote themselves as being a different kind of migrant. The way in which a migrant is distinguished from an expatriate is the question of return – the migrant is expected to stay, while an expatriate is expected to return to their home country. Yet the term ‘expatriate’ often becomes one that is axiomatically applied to Western migrants living abroad. This paper argues that we should not see the term ‘expatriate’ as axiomatic in describing this type of mobility, as we need to pay attention to the political context in which the term is enmeshed. The paper therefore argues that we need to understand how expatriation is not only understood as an identity in relation to the place of stay abroad, but also in comparison to migration as a whole. To do this, the paper looks first at how British migrants in Singapore draw upon racialised understandings of immigration debates to portray expatriates as being ‘good’ migrants. Second, it considers how the term expatriate is deployed in social sciences literature itself. Copyright
This article focuses on forms of opposition to ‘othering’ and far-right politics in present-day Greece. This opposition takes a variety of forms, comes from a range of actors, and is motivated by a number of concerns with differing assessments of what should be done. More specifically, the article focuses on the far right in Greece and discrimination, hate speech, and hate crime against the ‘other’ from the perspectives of those who are active in mobilizing against racism and counteracting the country’s populist and neo-nationalist turn. Concentrating on the forces opposing discrimination, the analysis describes present-day social movements and actions from grassroots to governmental level, their strategies and politics, their diversity of thought and action, and their contribution in providing the resources for social change, and the production of new meaning in the context of anti-racism in Greece. Trying to provide answers as to how social movements and activists produce meaning, we argue that activists develop less intentional, inadvertent meanings which emerge in the course of the not-always conscious schemas of their struggle. This calls for a more dynamic explanation of the relationship between practice and meaning-making in social movement contexts.
‘International migration management’ has become a popular catchphrase for a wide range of initiatives that aim at renewing the policies pertaining to the cross-border movements of people. It is used by numerous actors, both within and outside governments. At the international level, the term is intensively used by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) (whose motto is ‘Managing migration for the benefit of all’), the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD), the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Council of Europe and other international agencies. At the national level, the approach in terms of ‘management’ pervades, for example, the British government’s White Paper on immigration, ‘Secure Borders, Safe Haven’.
Radical right-wing populist parties, such as Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom, Marine Le Pen’s National Front or Nigel Farage’s UKIP, are becoming increasingly influential in Western European democracies. Their electoral support is growing, their impact on policy-making is substantial, and in recent years several radical right-wing populist parties have assumed office or supported minority governments.
Are these developments the cause and/or consequence of the mainstreaming of radical right-wing populist parties? Have radical right-wing populist parties expanded their issue profiles, moderated their policy positions, toned down their anti-establishment rhetoric and shed their extreme right reputations to attract more voters and/or become coalition partners? This timely book answers these questions on the basis of both comparative research and a wide range of case studies, covering Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
Analysing the extent to which radical right-wing populist parties have become part of mainstream politics, as well as the factors and conditions which facilitate this trend, this book is essential reading for students and scholars working in European politics, in addition to anyone interested in party politics and current affairs more generally.
How should political parties deal with extremist parties? In some countries an accommodating approach prevails, while in Flanders (Belgium) political actors pursue a much more repressive approach. While a democratic coalition against the Flemish populist party Vlaams Belang (VB) continues to be maintained, the effectiveness and legitimacy of its exclusionary politics have regularly been called into question. The political and normative debate tends to be at the forefront in this regard, while little attention is paid to public opinion. In the present article we try to determine what citizens think about the cordon sanitaire using in-depth interviews. The results show that attitudes towards exclusionary politics are based on pragmatism, strategy and principles. The pragmatic vision depends on people's definition of the party and their assessment of the risks associated with its participation in government, while principled arguments are dependent on the fundamental meaning assigned to democracy. Most VB voters do not consider VB to be an antagonistic enemy, but rather an agonistic adversary and the true defender of the people, while most non-VB voters still defend the legitimacy of the cordon sanitaire, focusing on the potentially perverse effects of government participation and advocating both procedural and substantive principles of democracy.
In the last 20 years, industrialised Western nations have witnessed a marked increase in right-wing social movements and political parties. While the origins and agendas of these groups differ in important ways, all arose in a climate of intensifying globalisation. All arose in the context of a widespread embrace of multiculturalism and cultural diversity. And all are keenly focused on the perceived threats posed by immigration. This paper examines immigration threat narratives constructed by four of these groups: the British National Party, the One Nation Party, the Tea Party Patriots, and the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps. Striking similarities in the narratives employed by these groups suggest the emergence of a transnational right-wing populist ‘playbook’. The paper further argues that even when the direct electoral impact of such groups is relatively small, they have the potential to substantially reshape broader political discourse and public policy.
The populist radical right parties (PRRP) have received a considerable amount of interest in European politics during the past ten years. Their increasing popularity and electoral success has been debated both in the academic literature and in the wider society. While many PRRPs are now actively engaged in an anti-immigration discourse, many of them arguing against multiculturalism and the difficulties of integrating immigrant communities into native cultures (Eatwell 2004: 2), one central theme in the current debates has been the relationship between cultural and economic motivations in the PRRP social and political discourse. Economic motivations have been emphasized by some (Betz 1994; Kitschelt and McGann 1995) while others have argued that the cultural motivations are primary (Rydgren 2004, 2006; Mudde 2007).
This paper focuses on representations of labour migrants and interrogates how such imaginaries shape migrant recruitment and employment regimes. The recruitment and employment of labour migrants inevitably involves a range of knowledge practices that affect who is recruited, from where and for what purposes. In particular, this paper seeks to advance understandings of how images of ‘bodily goodness’ are represented graphically and how perceptions of migrant workers influence the recruitment of workers to the UK from Latvia. The research described in this paper is based on interviews with recruitment agencies, employers and policy makers carried out in Latvia in 2011. The analysis results in a schema of the ‘filtering’ processes that are enacted to ‘produce’ the ‘ideal’ migrant worker. An important original contribution of this paper is that it details how recruitment agencies, in not only engaging in the spatially selective recruitment of labour from certain places but also drawing socially constructed boundaries around migrant bodies, play a key part in shaping migration geographies both in sending and destination countries.
Since the 1990s populist radical right (PRR) parties have experience considerable electoral success. With political success the PRR has also gained formal political power by participating in coalition governments in Austria, Switzerland and Italy, as well as informal power, by supporting center-right governments in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. This article examines the conditions that shape the success and failure of PRR in their attempts to transition from opposition to government. The article focuses on four cases: three successes – the Swiss People's Party, the Lega Nord and the Danish People's Party and one failure – the Austrian Freedom Party. In order to explain the success and failure of the PRR in government, this articles combine insights from structure and agency approaches. Structural approaches focus on three aspects of the party environment: the PRR's electoral success relative to other parties; policy convergence between PRR and established parties; and the growing numerical importance of the PRR for coalition formation, especially within the context of close elections and, in some cases, bipolarizing party systems. However, the article argues that the structural approach, on its own, does not explain the electoral success and failure of the PRR parties in government. In order to explain success and failure in government, insights from agency approaches are required. Three criteria are crucial: ‘keeping one foot in government and one foot out’, maintaining control over their policy agenda, and a well-organized party.
In the last two decades, populist radical right (PRR) parties have been electorally very successful in Western Europe. Various scholars have argued that these parties share an ideological core that consists of a specific form of nationalism (nativism), in combination with two other attitudes (authoritarianism and populism). The aim of this research note is to assess whether this ideological core also exists as a consistent attitude among citizens. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of the attitudes of Dutch citizens indicate that we can indeed speak of a consistent PRR attitude among the public. I also show that this attitude is strongly related to the probability of voting for the PRR Freedom Party (Partij voor de Vrijheid) of Geert Wilders.
In this article I argue that the radical right articulates a coherent ideology vis-a`-vis immigration. Radical right populist parties assert that uncontrolled immigration increases crime, threatens security, precipitates the lost of cultural identity, removes jobs from locals and overstrains the welfare state. After focusing on the immigration ideology of the Freedom Party and the Lega Nord, I then examine whether the ideology of these two radical right populist parties have influenced immigration policy in Austria and in Italy. Highlighting the link between ideology and public policy, I argue that the Freedom Party and the Lega Nord have been instrumental in passing more restrictive immigration policy, limiting the flow of immigrants and the ability of non-EU-labour to live, work, and settle permanently in either Austria or Italy.
Skenderovic's article focuses on the relationship between the issue of immigration and parties of the radical right. Immigration serves as the primary focus for these parties, mirroring their exclusionist world-view in which nationalism, neo-racism and xenophobia are the most prominent features. As powerful competitors in most European party systems, radical-right parties have played an influential role in the struggle that has taken place over the way in which immigrants have been defined and perceived in the last twenty years. Their strategy of presenting immigration as a contentious and menacing development appears to bring some electoral success, since voters support these parties on account of their immigration agenda and their view of immigrants. As Skenderovic shows, Switzerland serves as a particularly interesting case study. Since the 1960s, radical-right parties have used the issue of immigration to appeal to voters and have contributed to the fact that the theme of immigration has remained at the centre of the Swiss political stage. With their exclusionist agenda, Swiss radical-right parties have sought to present immigration as a threat to the country. Instruments available in the system of direct democracy have allowed effective opportunities for these parties to expound on immigration-related issues and to have considerable influence on immigration policymaking. In addition, the alleged danger of Überfremdung, 'over-foreignization', a longstanding discursive frame in Swiss immigration policy, has been consistently evoked by radical-right parties seeking to bolster their anti-immigration campaigns. By primarily drawing attention to the supply side of political mobilization, the Swiss case conspicuously demonstrates the significant roles that a favourable institutional and discursive environment and a concise immigration agenda can play both in the efforts of radical-right parties to gain popular support and in pushing through their demands on issues related to immigration.
Despite the proliferation of studies exploring the success of the populist radical right, there is a lack of research on why these parties decline or fail. And when this question is addressed, the literature focuses on supply-side variables such as leadership battles or a lack of organizational structure. These explanations largely fall short, however, in understanding the strange decline of the Belgian Vlaams Belang at the latest elections. Instead, it is argued that there is less space available for the populist radical right. Survey data suggests that two competing parties succeeded in exploiting issues that were previously owned exclusively by the Vlaams Belang (VB). More surprising, however, is the impact of the cordon sanitaire on the decline of the VB. This study shows that although populist radical right parties might not perform well in government, they will face difficulties too if they stay in permanent opposition, because they become perceived as irrelevant in the long run.