Collusion Between Mainstream Parties and Anti-Establishment Parties’ Success

• In Event: Italy at the Crossroads

Abstract

It is a common wisdom that outsider parties may take advantage of mainstream parties colluding with each other, either by participating in the same government coalition or significantly reducing their ideological distance. This reinforces populist or anti-establishment leaders claim to represent the only real alternative to traditional politics. The same argument can be presented in spatial terms – the more mainstream parties get closer to each other, the more political space is available for outsider challengers. Although very diffused, such arguments have received relatively little attention in the literature, especially in a comparative perspective. This is what we aim to do in this paper. We have assembled an original dataset including governmental coalitions and party positions in 17 Western European countries since 1980. In order to test the ‘collusion hypothesis’, we use coalitional formulas and ideological distance as independent variables to explain the electoral success of challenger parties. Our preliminary results show that the the relations between ideological convergence and Grand Coalition formulas and the rise of anti-establishment parties are not as straightforward as usually assumed in the literature.

Authors

• Filippo Tronconi, Università di Bologna

• Marco Valbruzzi