The Effect of Far Right Success on Mainstream Party Positions on Equality

• In Event: Backlash: Moves Against Gender Equality in the Modern Age

Abstract

When mainstream parties are under threat from the far right, do women and minority groups pay the price? The rise of populist radical right (PRR) parties has led many political commentators to suggest that the mainstream parties avoid "identity politics", which are perceived to divide important constituencies. This paper explores how radical right party entry into a party system affects mainstream party priorities and policies on social justice and equality. Building on existing work which finds that far right success can shift mainstream positions on immigration and muliticulturalism, we offer two alternative hypotheses. Parties could either adjust their positioning to take the more extreme grievances of these parties and their supporters into account (de-emphasizing social justice and equality issues), or they might double down on their positions to provide a counterpoint (increasing their support for social justice and equality issues). 

Focusing on parties in advanced democracies over a period of three decades, we test the argument in two ways. First, we exploit the existence of electoral thresholds to identify the causal effect of radical right party entry into the legislature on mainstream party positions and policies through a regression discontinuity design (Abou Chadi and Krause 2018). The dependent variables are Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) items relating to social justice and equality, as well as original data on the existence and threshold of voluntary party quotas. We also examine whether the response of mainstream parties is conditioned by party ideology and the descriptive representation of women and minorities. Second, using statistical matching we select two countries otherwise similar except for success of the far right, and examine how mainstream party priorities towards equality have changed over time in both countries. This text analysis portion will shed important light on exactly how political debate around social justice issues changes when radical right parties achieve success which cannot be gleaned from the existing CMP manifesto data alone. 

Authors

• Peter Allen, University of Bath

• Ana Catalano Weeks, University of Bath