Shaping Competition: Allies' Party Licensing and the Extreme Right in Germany

• In Event: Populist Strategies and Leaders

Abstract

Political elites in new democracies typically confront the problem of how to mitigate the destabilizing potential of large masses of alienated voters who might oppose the new regime, either because they are still ideologically linked to the past authoritarian regime or because they associate the democratic transition with the loss of material resources and social prestige. The dilemmas associated with this situation are well known: preventing the reorganization of radical “successor parties” might increase voters’ alienation and sow the seeds of more instability, while allowing such organizations to compete freely might entail costs in terms of government stability and effectiveness in the shorter term. Using a subnational design and a combination of electoral data and public opinion surveys, the paper explores the impact of these choices on democratic legitimacy and the development of the extreme right in West Germany during the first decade of the Federal Republic. We find that licensing moderate nationalist parties promoted democratic legitimacy and pro-democratic attitudes, and it did not improve the subsequent electoral prospects of more radical parties. By contrast, we find more mixed implications of licensing more radical nationalist parties: while the presence of such parties promoted trust in the party system and did not pave the way for future radical right electoral successes, it was associated with weaker support for democratic values.

Authors

• Giovanni Capoccia, University of Oxford

• Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University