Between Welfare State Retrenchment and Welfare Chauvinism: Policy Outcomes of the Danish People’s Party’s Government Participation

The increasing electoral success of populist right-wing parties (PRWPs) has led to PRWPs’ recurrent government participation in Western European democracies. The inclusion of PRWPs in the government coalition has allowed mainstream right-wing parties to assume offices and implement their policy preferences. It also gave PRWPs the opportunity to influence policymaking on their core issues, such as immigration and integration. However, the differences in policy positions regarding distributive issues posed a potential conflict between the coalition parties. Mainstream parties’ priority goal is economic performance, which often involves welfare state retrenchment, while PRWPs defend a comprehensive welfare state as well as welfare chauvinism measures.

While this dilemma is documented in the literature, the policy mix of welfare retrenchment and welfare chauvinism, which results from PRWPs incumbency, has barely been explored. Additionally, the conditions that enable PRWPs to imprint their preferences on distributive issues and the impact of policy outcomes on electoral results have been largely ignored. Therefore, this paper aims explore these questions by addressing the period when the Danish Peoples’ Party (DPP) supported the minority coalition formed by Venstre and Conservatives.

This Danish case merits further investigation. First, the country experienced a long and stable PRWP government participation, from 2001 to 2011. However, this timeframe coincides with a financial crisis, which favored the adoption of retrenchment policies by the right-wing government. This research relies on legislative agreements between government and DPP as well as newspaper articles and parties’ press communications.