Is salience a cause or a consequence of radical right electoral support?

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).

Related posts:

1. The Radical Right in Perspective: Program (ECPR conference 2009)
2. Call for Papers: Perspectives on the Radical Right
3. Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties
4. Library of Electoral Behaviour/Electoral Behavior
5. Section: Perspectives on the Radical Right