Saturday, April 16, 2016
Assembly E (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Building on recent findings that radical right parties in western Europe have shifted to the left on economic issues (Eger & Valdez 2015), we examine the movement of these parties cross-nationally over time. We rely on data from the Comparative Manifesto Project (Volkens et al., 2015) to plot the trajectories of parties’ social and economic platforms relative to other parties in each political system from 1970 to 2015, which allows us to identify cross-national trends in platform development. In general, these parties tend to hold classic neoliberal preferences in the 1970s and early 80s, preferring little government regulation on either economic or social matters, then begin to abandon liberal positions on social issues while holding steady in their economic positions. However, beginning in the mid 1990s, the parties start shifting to the left on economic issues until they converge on their current stance: economically leftist and socially conservative. Although today these parties are similar in that they share an identifiable neonationalist ideology which differs significantly from that of the radical right, the trajectories of change-- from socially liberal to socially conservative and from economically rightist to economically leftist-- have depended on openings in their respective political systems. This work builds upon the existing literature which attributes the emergence and success of the radical right to favorable openings in the political landscape by helping us understand how the parties maintain success over decades by shifting their platforms in dynamic political systems.
