One feels almost (almost!) sorry for the Social Democratic left: They are squeezed between the more modern Greens/Libertarians on the one hand, and the Extreme Right on the other. The latter has been remarkably successful in poaching working class voters who are worried about immigration and don’t feel particularly attached to the unions or the parties of the left. In a relatively recent contribution (Bale et al. 2010), Tim Bale and colleagues take a closer look at this dilemma and identify three Social Democratic strategies for dealing with it.
While their work is largely qualitative, I’ve crunched the numbers and tried to shed some light on two related questions: Is the Extreme Right really subject to a process of proletarisation, and can the strategies outlined by Bale et al. work to win back working class voters.
The result is still somewhat work in progress – comments are highly appreciated.
Continue reading “Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties” »
Tags: centre left, competition, extreme right, far right, ideology, immigrants, immigration, manifestos, salience, social democrats, Toughness, unemployment, Variance, voting, welfare state, west europeans
Category My Stuff, Political Science|
In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties
Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react
makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument: if radical right support is stable in the medium term, and if other parties react to past successes for the radical right by modifying their manifestos, this relationship might be spurious. In my paper for the ECPR conference at Potsdam, I use a time-series model to address this problem: I estimate a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of radical right support and issue salience in France (while controlling for immigration and unemployment). As it turns out, salience is independent of previous radical right success. This finding provides some support for my original argument, though the analysis preliminary and restricted to France (at the moment). Continue reading “Is salience a cause or a consequence of radical right electoral support?” »
Tags: conference, ecpr, electoral support, europe, issue salience, manifestos, time series model, vote
Category Data and Methods, My Stuff, Political Science|
