Appearing moderate or radical? Radical left party success and the two-dimensional political space

Challenger parties’ electoral successes have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Based on the example of West European radical left parties, this article investigates whether and how centripetal and centrifugal positional movements on different conflict dimensions influence the election results of these parties. Depending on parties’ issue-linkages, these strategies will have a different effect for the economic and the non-economic issue dimension. Due to radical left parties’ long-term commitment and a strong party-issue linkage on economic issues, more moderate positions will play to their electoral advantage. In contrast, far-left parties compete with social democratic and green-libertarian parties for party-issue linkages on the non-economic issue dimension. Here, they benefit from promoting centrifugal strategies. Based on time-series cross-section analyses for 25 West European far-left parties between 1990 and 2017, the empirical results show that the success of radical left parties’ positional strategies varies with the conflict dimension in question and that this effect is only partly moderated by the positions of competing mainstream left parties

Becoming part of the gang? Established and nonestablished populist parties and the role of external efficacy

In this article, we examine the extent to which the influence of external efficacy on support for populist parties is conditional on the degree to which a populist party is an established player in a given party system. We do so using a two-step regression approach that allows us to investigate the varying effect of external efficacy in a multilevel setting. Making use of data on 23 European Union member states, we empirically demonstrate that the nature of support for populists varies depending on the extent to which these parties are established actors in their national party systems. This is true for Western and Eastern European populist parties. These findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on the success and survival of populist parties. They indicate that these parties do not keep up their image as radical opponents of the national political establishment the more they become electorally successful and join government coalitions

Shifting Welfare Policy Positions: The Impact of Radical Right Populist Party Success Beyond Migration Politics

Political parties respond strategically to the electoral success of radical right populist parties (RRPPs). While previous research has focused on programmatic responses on cultural conflict issues, we are expanding the research on policy position adaption to the economic left-right issue of welfare-state politics. Actual and potential supporters of RRPPs do not only feel threatened by migration or liberal conceptions of society but are also often confronted with real or perceived socio-economic decline. Therefore, we argue that established parties do not only react by changing their socio-cultural policy offers but also by adjusting their welfare state policy positions. Based on parties' voter potentials and issue ownership theory, we investigate whether such changes are especially pronounced for left-of-center parties. Analysing data from 18 West European countries since 1985, we find that non-RRPPs indeed advocate more leftist positions on welfare state policies in response to increasing electoral support for RRPPs. This effect is especially pronounced for economically left-of-centre parties as these parties might consider this to be a promising strategy to win back voters from the populist radical right

Putting electoral competition where it belongs: comparing vote-based measures of electoral competition

Electoral competition is a cornerstone of representative democracies. However, measuring its extent and intensity constitutes a challenging task for the discipline. Based on multilevel conceptualizations, we discuss three different measures of political competition (electoral volatility, vote switching, and voters' availability) and their relation to each other. We argue that electoral volatility and vote switching as indicators of electoral competitiveness tend to misestimate the degree of competition in multiparty systems. As an alternative, we propose focusing on the individual’s propensity to vote for different parties, i.e. electoral availability. Using data provided by the European Election Studies, we compare availability to electoral volatility and vote switching in the framework of necessary and sufficient conditions. Our regression results show that operationalizing electoral competitiveness based on voter availability - which is increasingly retrievable from cross-national voter surveys - helps to avoid type-II errors, i.e. identifying competitive elections as less or non-competitive

The Causal Effect of Radical Right Success on Mainstream Parties' Policy Positions: A Regression Discontinuity Approach

This article investigates how the success of radical right parties affects the policy positions of mainstream parties. We do this using a regression discontinuity approach that allows us to causally attribute mainstream parties’ positional changes to radical right strength independent of public opinion as a potential confounder. Making use of exogenous variation created through differences in electoral thresholds, we empirically demonstrate that radical right success, indeed, causally affects mainstream parties’ positions. This is true for mainstream left as well as mainstream right parties. These findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on party competition as they indicate that other parties’ behavior and not only public opinion plays a crucial role in explaining parties’ policy shift

Radical right success and mainstream parties’ anti-immigrant policy shifts

Radical right parties have seen increasing electoral success throughout Europe. What does this imply for parties and party systems? Do established mainstream parties adjust their policy positions in response to successful radical right parties? If yes, is this ‘contagious effect’ restricted to specific party families or is this an overall trend within European politics? Tarik Abou-Chadi and Werner Krause investigate these questions and find that mainstream parties adjust their policy strategies when confronted with a successful radical right challenger and shift toward more anti-immigrant positions. Using a novel research design, they can demonstrate that these shifts are not just a response to changing public opinion but can be causally attributed to the success of the radical right