Right-Wing Division of Labor: Party System Configuration, Fragmentation, and Electoral Strategies

How does the party system configuration affect the strategic choices and opportunities of right-wing parties? Scholars of European party politics argue that compared to the left, the right had historically been a more fragmented political space. This, they suggest, is among the key causes for the weakness of the European right. Yet there is a place to revisit this assumption and further develop the theoretical mechanisms that connect voters’ preferences, party system configuration and electoral strategies.

In this paper I suggest that under certain conditions, the diversification of the right can be an opportunity rather than a weakness. This is especially so when voters’ preferences on different policy dimensions are unbundled: that is, when voters have liberal preferences on some dimensions but not others, and vice versa. Right-wing parties can take advantage of this when they present voters with qualitatively different combinations of positions on different dimensions. This opens the door to a ‘right-wing division of labor’, in which parties on the right mobilize constituencies with diverse preferences and thus expand the right-wing parliamentary bloc. I examine this argument using survey data on voters’ preferences and parties’ positions in 2010.