language: english

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something true? A comment on Lister’s ‘Institutions, Inequality and Social Norms: Explaining Variations in Participation’

Michael Lister makes a useful contribution to the discussion on aggregate variables that foster or depress turnout by drawing attention to societal factors, but his analysis is fraught with methodological problems. While his article builds on an interesting theoretical argument about the impact of institutions on attitudes, his claims about causal relationships are not backed by data. There is no rationale for the selection of countries, and most explanatory variables are actually constant within countries. The specification of the model is problematic in many ways. A careful re-analysis shows that the t-values reported in Lister’s article are far too large, while the estimates are unstable and dependent on the selection of observations. Moreover, the effects are trivial in terms of their political implications. There is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between inequality and turnout.

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

Why is support for the Extreme Right unstable over time and uneven across countries? This study covers the joint effect of micro and macro factors on the Extreme Right vote in all EU-15 countries plus Switzerland and Norway from 1980 to 2002. 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 individual and contextual variables are controlled for.

Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties

This article examines the relationship between Christian religiosity and the support for radical right parties in Western Europe. Drawing on theories of electoral choice and on socio-psychological literature largely ignored by scholars of electoral behaviour, it suggests and tests a number of competing hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that while religiosity has few direct effects, and while religious people are neither more nor less hostile towards ethnic minorities and thereby neither more nor less prone to vote for a radical right party, they are not ‘available’ to these parties because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or conservative parties. However, given increasing de-alignment, this ‘vaccine effect’ is likely to become weaker with time.

Protest, Neo-Liberalism or Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: What Motivates the Voters of the Extreme Right in Western Europe?

Over the last three decades, the parties of the “Extreme”, “Radical” or “Populist” Right have become a political staple in Western Europe. However, comparative evidence on the motives of their voters is relatively scarce. This article assesses the empirical effects of the most prominent alleged motivational factors “pure” (i.e. performance related) protest, anti-immigrant sentiment, and neo-liberal economic preferences – on the extreme right vote while controlling for a whole host of background variables. While protest and neo-liberalism have no statistically significant impact whatsoever, immigrant sentiment plays a crucial role in all countries but Italy. Its effect is moderated, however, by general ideological preferences and party identification. Consequentially, comparative electoral research should focus on the circumstances under which immigration is politicised.

Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties

The propensity of workers to vote for the Extreme Right has risen significantly. This “proletarisation” is the result of the interplay between a long-term dealignment process and increasing worries amongst the European working classes about the immigration of cheap labour. As a result, Western European Centre Left parties may find themselves squeezed between the New Right on the one hand and the New Left on the other. There is no obvious strategy for dealing with this dilemma. Staying put will not win working class defectors back. Toughening up immigration policies is unpalatable for many party members, does not seem to make Social Democrats more attractive for working class voters, and might eventually alienate other social groups

How (not) to Operationalise Subnational Political Opportunity Structures

Kestilä and Söderlund (2007) examine the impact of subnational political opportunity structures on the success of the radical right and argue that such an approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross-national analyses. The present article disputes this claim on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrates that their empirical findings are spurious.

Radical Attitudes

Like many other concepts in political science, the notion of radicalism harks back to the political conflicts of the late 18th and 19th century. Even then, its content was depended on the political context and far from well defined. Consequentially, being “radical” has meant different things to different people in different times and countries. Moreover, radicalism is closely related, if not identical to a number of (equally vague) concepts such as extremism, fundamentalism, and populism. As of today, there is no universally accepted definition of radicalism, and, by implication, radical attitudes.

Fringe Parties

There is no universally accepted definition of what constitutes a “fringe party”. “Fringe party” is mostly used by journalists, politicians and political scientists as a pejorative term to demarcate the boundary between “reasonable politics” and the “lunatic fringe”, a label famously applied by Theodore Roosevelt in his Autobiography to describe “the foolish fanatics always to be found in such a [reform] movement and always discrediting it” (Roosevelt 1922, 206). Consequently, some political scientists have argued that the term should best be replaced by more neutral expressions, such as “marginal parties”, “non-established parties” or “non-mainstream parties”.

Political Efficacy

Political Efficacy is a term that refers to the “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process, i.e. that it is worth while to perform one’s civic duties” (Campbell/Gurin/Miller 1954: 187). Like with many important concepts in the field of political communication and sociology, its origins…

Voter Behaviour

Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, four basic models of voter behavior have been proposed on which almost all studies of electoral behavior draw. These models describe how humans react to environmental factors and choose between different courses of action. Homo sociologicus (more or less implicitly) forms the basis of the approaches to voting behavior laid out in the first three parts of this entry. In contrast rational voter theory explicitly invokes homo oeconomicus through deductive reasoning. A closer examination reveals, however, that these seemingly very different approaches are in fact complementary and can be regarded as aspects of an overarching model. In the past few years this line of reasoning has become increasingly present both in social-psychological as well as rational choice writings.