Episode 1.8: The Gravitational Pull of Europe’s Far Right, with Tarik Abou-Chadi

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Zürich, about how far-right parties have reshaped politics in advanced democracies. 

Consider the dilemma faced by mainstream political parties of right and the left in much of Europe. Center-right, conservative and social democratic parties dominated European politics for most of the postwar era, consistently winning large proportions of the vote at election time. Over the last two decades, however, far-right parties running on nationalist, anti-immigration platforms have expanded their appeal to become formidable electoral competitors, steadily taking votes and parliamentary seats from mainstream parties and complicating the task of forming traditional governing coalitions. (Indeed, the same is true of Green and far left parties, but that’s a topic for another episode.)

Center-right and center-left parties face a strategic dilemma in deciding how to respond to the threat posed by the far right. One strategy available to mainstream parties is to maintain their more moderate positions on issues like immigration while making a case against the xenophobia and nativism that the far right is peddling or trying to change the subject to other issues. Alternatively, mainstream parties can try to coopt the far right’s policy stance, taking more nationalist, anti-immigrant positions themselves in an attempt to take the wind out of the far right’s sails. Which of these strategies have most mainstream European parties adopted? And do those strategies work?

Dr. Tarik Abou-Chadi is among those currently doing the most interesting and sophisticated research on the politics of the far right. We talk with Tarik about two of his recent papers: an article with Werner Krause published in 2020 in the British Journal of Political Science on the causal effect of radical-right party success on mainstream parties’ issues positions; and a working paper with Krause and Denis Cohen evaluating the success of mainstream parties’ efforts to accommodate far-right policy stances. Taken together, these two papers paint a picture of how mainstream parties respond to the challenge posed by the far right and of the limits of trying to beat the far right at its own game. 

On the whole, this is a conversation about how the radical right has shifted the terms of political debate across Europe, and about how the far right can achieve its policy goals, such as clamp-downs on immigration, without even entering government. We also talk with Tarik about the empirical strategies that he and his coauthors use to address difficult challenges of causal inference: in particular, the regression-discontinuity design (RDD) that they employ. We discuss the logic and benefits of the RDD strategy as well as some of its limits in allowing us to draw generalizable inferences.

Be sure to also check out Tarik’s terrific podcast, Transformation of European Politics, including his interviews with authors whose work we discuss in this episode: Rafaela Dancygier, Tamar Mitts and Cas Mudde.

Works discussed in the episode:

Bischof, Daniel and Markus Wagner. 2019. “Do Voters Polarize when Radical Parties Enter Parliament?” American Journal of Political Science, 63(4), pp. 888-904.

Dancygier, Rafaela M., 2017. Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dancygier, Rafaela and Margalit, Y. 2020. “The Evolution of the Immigration Debate: Evidence from a New Dataset of Party Positions over the Last Half-Century.” Comparative Political Studies, 53(5), pp. 734-774.

Dinas, Elias, Pedro Riera, and Nasos Roussias. 2015. “Staying in the first league: Parliamentary representation and the electoral success of small parties.” Political Science Research and Methods, 3(2), pp. 187-204.

Hartman, Erin and Daniel F. Hidalgo. 2018. “An Equivalence Approach to Balance and Placebo Tests.” American Journal of Political Science, 62(4), pp. 1000-1013.

Lipset, Seymour Martin, 1959. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism.” American Sociological Review, pp. 482-501.

Manifesto Project Database, <https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/>.

Meguid, Bonnie M., 2005. “Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success.” American Political Science Review, 99(3), pp. 347-359.

Meguid, Bonnie, 2008. Party Competition between Unequals: Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mitts, Tamar, 2019. “From Isolation to Radicalization: Anti-Muslim Hostility and Support for ISIS in the West.” American Political Science Review, 113(1), pp. 173-194.

Mudde, Cas, 2019. The Far Right Today. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.