The Impact of Radical Right Government Policies on Perceptions of Representation

• In Event: Perceived Representation and Support for Democracy

Abstract

During the last decades, populist radical right (PRR) parties advancing nativist agendas have been on the rise across Western democracies. In Western Europe, PRR parties have achieved parliamentary representation in most countries. And in some countries, they have even reached executive power through inclusion in government coalitions (e.g. Austria and Norway) — or have acted as parliamentary support for minority coalitions (e.g. Denmark and the Netherlands). Although nativist parties have over time been increasingly able to influence government policy, little is known about how PRR government inclusion affects citizens’ legitimacy beliefs and feelings of representation.

It is often assumed that the electoral success and often-illiberal policy agendas pursued by the populist radical right are likely to affect legitimacy beliefs negatively. First, it has been shown that PRR supporters are more politically discontented and less trusting (e.g. Rooduijn et al. 2016). Second, PRR success and policy influence are also likely to provoke negative reactions among mainstream party voters (cf. Harteveld et al. 2021). Recently, however, it has been argued that PRR parties fill a representational void in the policy space by meeting a more general electoral demand for certain policies that are not offered by other parties (for instance on immigration) (e.g. Kriesi 2014). If so, one would expect the influence of the populist right to increase political support by bringing government policy closer to public opinion, and hence increase public perceptions of representation. This argument has received empirical support in recent studies drawing on observational survey data, showing that PRR representation in government and parliament have a positive effect on aggregate levels of political support, i.e. beyond PRR party supporters (e.g. Harteveld et al. 2021; Kriesi and Schulte-Cloos (2020).

The main aim of this study is to examine how the public reacts to a government coalition pursuing policies advanced by PRR parties (e.g. stricter immigration and asylum rules). To do this, we conduct a conjoint experiment in which we ask respondents to evaluate a set of hypothetical policy platforms that contain information about what a newly elected government plans to do in several policy-areas. The policy position in each area is randomly assigned from a pool of actual policy positions extracted from the manifestos of the major national parties (including the PRR party). This way we can estimate, causally, how the inclusion of PRR policies affects respondents’ feelings of representation and political support. The experiment will (first) be fielded in Norway and Sweden, where the largest PRR parties have had very different positions in terms of representation. In Norway, the Progress Party was part of a government coalition from 2013 to 2020, while the Sweden Democrats for long has been isolated by the mainstream parties.

A major advantage of the design is that by randomly varying multiple policy positions at the same time, we reduce the social desirability bias associated with certain policy positions — often precisely those positions advanced by PRR parties. Since the policy platforms in the treatment include several policies, individual respondents do not disclose which specific policy in the platform that most affected their judgment. This will however be uncovered for the public as a whole in the overall aggregate estimates.

Authors

• Ruben Berge Mathisen, Univeristy of Bergen

• Jonas Linde, Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen

• Andrej Kokkonen, University of Gothenburg