AUTOR: Kai Arzheimer / Elizabeth Carter

TITEL: Explaining Variation in the Extreme Right Vote: The Individual and the Political Environment

QUELLE: Keele European Parties Research Unit (KEPRU), Working Paper 19

VOLLTEXT (PDF)

ABSTRACT:

West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention in the academic literature over the past two decades due to the success that many of these actors have experienced at the polls. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe in this period. In view of the general shortage of studies on this subject, and given that the few works that have addressed this issue have tended to offer only partial explanations for this phenomenon, this paper seeks to put forward an account for the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been previously considered. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote and it assesses the extent to which the variation in the parties' vote scores may be explained by such variables as gender, age, education and class. Then, in a second section, the paper turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote. These include institutional variables, party system variables and conjectural variables. The paper concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe.

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