The Dynamics of Party Competition: Locating Anti-Immigrant Parties in European Political Space, 1970-2010

Building on our findings that anti-immigrant parties have, in terms of economics, shifted from the right to the left side of the political spectrum in Europe, in this paper we endeavor to track the movement of all party families in a two-dimension political space. Our previous research found that anti-immigrant parties have shifted in political space relative to the average position of each major European party family since 1970.  In order to explain this apparent ideological shift and understand better the strategies of anti-immigrant parties, we improve our model by tracing the movement of each party family over time rather than relying on its average position. We then repeat this for each country. Our results will capture the dynamism of party competition and provide insight into the ways that anti-immigrant parties have positioned themselves—relative to movement of other parties—in order to achieve electoral success.