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In recent years, many Western democracies have experienced a dramatic surge in far right populist success. But the far right achieved notable levels of success long before Brexit, Trump, or Le Pen’s strong performance in the 2017 French presidential election. During the past three decades, many European party systems have seen the entry and consolidation of far right parties into the electoral arena. In order to explain this phenomenon, this seminar aims to investigate both individual and contextual drivers of electoral support for far right parties. It will primarily focus on far right parties in Western European parliamentary systems.
The seminar covers three substantive domains. The first is a brief overview of the definitional and conceptual approaches to classifying far right parties. This will involve a discussion of the core ideological features that characterize far right parties and of the issues and issue positions that far right parties campaign on. The second is an extensive analysis of the ‘demand-side’ of far right voting. For this purpose, we will engage with both general theories of voting behavior and empirical analyses of far-right voting in order to tackle two questions: Who votes for far right parties (i.e., what is the demographic and socio-structural make-up of their electorates?) and why (i.e., which attitudes, grievances and preferences underlie far right voting behavior?). The third part of this course covers a selective overview of the ‘supply-side’ of far right voting with special emphasis on theories of political competition. Here, we will examine how the strategic agency of far right parties and their established competitors shape their electoral fortunes.
Thus, this seminar is designed to familiarize students with seminal contributions in the theoretical and empirical literatures on voting behavior and political competition that help understand and explain electoral support for far right parties. It is less concerned with a discursive understanding of far right parties’ ideology or normative evaluations of their agency. Much of the empirical literature will feature results from quantitative analyses. Some familiarity with descriptive and inferential statistics (e.g., at the level of Statistik I+II) is therefore strongly recommended. The general language of instruction and communication is English.
The weekly readings will be accompanied by short student inputs based on brief memos. These will allow students to engage with the arguments and concepts introduced in the literature and to relate them to recent events such as Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election or the emergence of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). |
