Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002

Over the last 7 years or so, much of my work has focused on the question of why support for the Extreme Right is so unstable over time and so uneven across countries. In a recent paper on Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002, I estimate a model that aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modelling strategy, i.e. multi-level modelling. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for. Replication data for this article is available from my dataverse.

The final version of the paper will appear in the April issue of the American Journal of Political Science, which is obviously great.

Technorati-Tags: Extreme Right, Radical Right, Populist Right, Western Europe, Unemployment, Immigration, Agenda Setting, Welfare State, Voting, Eurobarometer, Multi-level Analysis, MLA, 1980, 2002

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3 thoughts on “Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002”

  1. I haven’t more than casually read through your paper yet, but it’s a really interesting topic.

    There is however something that made my scratch my head a bit. The only country I really know well among these is Norway, and here you’re referring to ER votes defined as votes for “the freedom party”. As far as I know there is no major party by that name. I’m assuming you’re referring to the party Fremskrittspartiet, which I’ve written about in this post and others. The correct English translations (and I checked that it is the one they use themselves on their webpage as well) of this party name should be “the Progress Party”.

    Whether or not they actually constitute an ER party is an interesting discussion in and of itself. Is there an accepted standard definition of what constitutes an ERP, or have these assumptions merely been made from traditional categorization of parties? Out of curiousity I’m really interested in learning how this is defined. Most articles I’ve read on the topic aren’t explicit on this.

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