Left Out or Right on Time - Radical Left Party’s Strategies towards Nationalism

• In Event: Extreme Parties and Positions

Abstract

As globalization becomes more of an everyday challenge in advanced industrial societies, political parties have to decide where they stand facing instability and threats on their understanding of democracy. Extensive research exists on nationalism and the radical right but we know very little about nationalism within the radical left. Where do radical left parties stand when it comes to nationalist issues? At first, one might think that radical left parties would not be nationalist. As winners and losers of globalization become more obvious, representing their voter base becomes more difficult for radical left parties. They can choose to pursue a domestic protectionism of the worker, or to campaign for open borders and free movement of labour. Mirroring the strategic behaviour of radical right parties on economic issues, some radical left parties may choose to adopt an ambiguous approach to their stance on nationalism. Do radical left parties make their stance on nationalism ambiguous strategically, or are they strategically choosing one side? This paper looks at cleavages within the radical left party family and shows how the cross-cutting nationalist dimension explains the key divide in the party family. Using this cleavage, the paper shows why the radical left party family only managed to become popular sporadically and in limited regions after the financial crash of 2008. To understand how radical left-wing parties adopted different strategies on nationalism and demonstrate how these party strategies have affected the radical left‘s electoral success, this research uses original manifesto data. This paper uses the text as data supervised scaling approach wordscores to determine the policy positioning of 14 radical left parties over the time period of the 1980s to their latest election. The findings of this research show that an ambiguous nationalist strategy will increase electoral success, while the positioning on the EU changes frequently within radical left parties and only shows long-term rather than short-term effects. These findings are furthermore analysed through a party competition perspective, showing that the success of cosmopolitan green parties has an effect on radical left party success. This research is a useful contribution to the study of radical left parties as it helps to understand the divides of the radical left party family further beyond a country specific context. The broader implications of the findings are that a substantial change of perspective of party strategy beyond left-right is necessary to explain party success or lack thereof. Furthermore, this research helps to understand the new issues that party systems have to organise around and how this is changing the structure of party competition.

Author

• Sarah Wagner