The New Working Class Party? the Radical Right and Its Socio-Economic Agenda

Populist right parties have become important political actors in Western European countries by mobilizing large parts of blue-collar workers and parts of the middle class. While the scholarly literature agrees that these parties' mobilization power is based on their anti-immigration discourse, disagreement surrounds populist right parties' position along social and economic issues ranging from welfare chauvinism to neoliberalism. Based on the relevant literature, the paper hypothesizes that populist right parties support social and economic issues which correspond with their class constituency and/or with the party’s support of or opposition towards the government. The paper draws on a detailed investigation of populist right parties' positions in labor market reforms in Denmark and Switzerland and shows that these populist right parties clearly follow a market liberal policy. In a second step these results can be confirmed using expert survey-data.