Pozhidaeva Erika

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  • № 2, 2019

    • Party Strategies as Success Factor of Radical Right Populists in European Political Space (Qualitative Comparative Analysis)

      The article presents the results of a comparative research study aimed at identifying the conditions for victories and defeats of radical right populist parties in modern Europe. First, the author provides theoretical justification for why such victories and defeats depend on the strategy of both radical right populists and their competitors from the traditional party families along three problematic dimensions — economic, cultural and European. After that she elaborates a hypothesis that the success of a radical right populist party is a result of its convergent strategy along the economic dimension in conjunction with the prevalence of divergent strategies among the mainstream parties along the cultural and European dimensions and tests it on the data of 12 right populist parties using the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).

      The empirical results partially confirm the hypothesis, identifying the link between the success of a radical right populist party and its commitment to a convergent economic strategy combined with the divergent strategies of the mainstream parties along the cultural and/or European dimensions. However, the research did not reveal the conditions for the defeat of such parties and did not explain the cases of Great Britain and France, where the radical right populists achieved notable success despite the fact that most identified conditions were absent. This begs further research with a focus on outliers. Such research may expand the list of success/defeat factors for radical right populists, taking into account the distribution of voters’ preferences in various dimensions of the political space.

      DOI: 10.30570/2078-5089-2019-93-2-108-124

      Pages: 108-124