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1. Introduction
The present thesis deals with populist radical right (PRR) parties in contemporary
Western Europe, a phenomenon which has been attracting an increasing amount of attention
in both public and academic debate. The thesis has two paramount goals: conceptualizing and
empirically assessing the common ideological fabric of these parties, and studying the
political consequences of these parties at agenda-setting level. Two main research questions
will be evaluated here. First, I will investigate whether PRR parties indeed share a common
ideological make-up combining nativism, authoritarianism and populism. Second, I will try to
demonstrate that PRR can have a profound impact on the systemic agenda concerning issues
of international relevance, like immigration and the EU. More specifically, the proposition
will be tested that this type of impact is not automatically determined by a single variable like
the electoral weight of a PRR (Green-Pedersen & Krogsdrup 2008), but it is rather shaped by
a set of dynamic variables and strategic considerations of the competing parties. In order to
answer this question, I will lay out a set of hypotheses concerning the patterns of agenda-
setting influence (also indirect policy impact) of PRR parties on their mainstream contenders.
These hypotheses will be then tested in a single case study dealing with the impact of UKIP
on the immigration and EU agenda in the UK from 2005 to 2015.
PRR parties are today extremely relevant as they raise a whole set of questions on the
future path taken by liberal democracy in the countries where they have seen their support
surge in the last few decades. Most studies on the PRR have focused on the major factors
accounting for the extraordinary electoral growth of these parties, which has allowed them, in
countries such as Austria, Italy and Denmark, to exert considerable influence over policy
outcomes (Betz 1994, Carter 2005, Norris 2005, Kitschelt 2007, Art 2011). These studies
take into account sociological, class-based and attitudinal variables to explain the electoral
support for PRR parties. Another field of research has instead focused on the major
ideological characteristics of these parties. The idea behind this line of research is that the
success of the PRR family has to do with their distinctive programmatic supply, namely the
set of issues and policy preferences that they offer to the electorate (Mudde 2007, Rydgren
2007). In a context of declining class-based voting and decreasing salience of the traditional
socioeconomic cleavage (Mair 2002), the idea is that parties can attract new voters by
proposing issues which resonate highly with them (Kriesi 1999, Mair 2002, Mouffe 2005,
Rydgren 2017). The present study builds on the second line of research, as it seeks to single
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out the key ideological features shared by these parties. However, this studies also goes a step
further, as it also aims to fill a remarkable gap in the existing research on the PRR party
family, namely the dimension of these parties’ political impact (Mudde 2016).
Political impact can play out on two different levels. First, impact can occur through
the more direct channel of decision-making, as parties enact and implement legislation. A
plausible explanation why the question of PRR political impact has remained widely
unexplored could hence be that these parties have so far largely remained on the sidelines of
the political space, due to both external constraints and internal limitations. Except for
Austria and Italy, no PRR party has so far obtained a government position in West European
democracies (Mudde 2013). Given this record, it is not so surprising that the political
consequences of rising PRR parties have been largely neglected. However, parties can exert
political impact also in an indirect, more subtle manner (Minkenberg 1998, Schain 2006,
Williams 2006). This dynamic is more relevant for smaller, niche parties which can thus hope
to bring about change even from outside the mainstream of the political arena. This type of
indirect impact would occur as niche parties manage to alter the structure of priorities of large
shares of the electorate and induce other parties to assume or coopt some of their distinctive
issues within their programmes (Harmel & Svåsand 1997, Abou-Chadi 2014). In order to
evaluate the PRR indirect impact, it is hence crucial to grasp some key dynamics of inter-
party strategic interaction. The two dimensions of party impact and inter-party interaction are
thus clearly intertwined, as political influence of a PRR challenger party unfolds according to
the logics of parties’ strategic interaction.
The thesis is structured as follows. In the second section I will carry out a
conceptualization of the PPR party family. In subsection 2.1, I will point out that in this study
the classification of the party family is steered by the observation of the ideological appeal of
the parties, rather than by the shared sociological characteristics of their voters. In subsection
2.2, the major structural issues related to PRR classification will be discussed. Subsection 2.3
will instead offer an overview of the most influential scholarly contributions to classification,
also touching upon some of their most remarkable limitations. Subsection 2.4 will then single
out the core ideological features of the PRR family. Drawing on Mudde’s (2007) seminal
work, a twofold definition will be employed, composed of a minimal definition and maximal
definition. The illustration will serve to avoid simplistic definitions and labels and provide a
more far-reaching conceptualization of this much-studied political phenomenon. Finally,
subsection 2.5 will seek to map the ideological profile of the parties most often associated
with this party family. For each medium-large Western European democracy, the country’s
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main PRR party will be examined, with a brief historical note and the assessment of its
ideological layout against the benchmark offered by the provided definition.
The third section will be devoted to the theoretical framework which will be then
employed for the empirical case on the UK. The two main pillars of this framework, as
anticipated, are approaches to party strategy in electoral competition on one side, and theories
of parties’ indirect policy influence on the other. Subsection 3.1 will review the most
influential approaches to dominating the research field of inter-party competition. I will thus
discuss the theory of positional or spatial competition (Downs 1957), as well as its revised
version (Stokes 1963) and the alternative theory of salience issue or salience-based
competition (Robertson 1976, Budge & Farlie 1983, Carmines & Stimson 1993). In addition,
I will deal with key concepts which will then serve as useful reference points within the
empirical case study: issue ownership (Petrocik 1996) and issue politicization (Carmines &
Stimson 1986). Subsection 3.2 will then draw the attention to the cited dynamics of parties’
political impact at agenda-setting level. The paramount notion of indirect policy impact of
peripheral or niche parties (Schain 2006, Williams 2006), the ultimate object of the present
thesis, will be discussed extensively. Alongside, I will deal with the related concept of
programmatic contagion or issue cooptation, also discussing some of the main factors behind
this phenomenon as identified by the literature. Finally, subsection 3.3 will set out the
research design, by presenting the main variables of interest for the case study. As for the
independent variable, a compound set of potential factors, based on the theoretical
illustration, will be singled out, and will underpin four main hypotheses.
Section 4 will be devoted to the empirical case study of PRR indirect policy impact,
corresponding to the said dynamics of programmatic or issue cooptation. In subsection 4.1 I
will explain the employed method and illustrate the operationalization of the variables. Then,
in subsection 4.2, the major actors at play will be clarified, namely UKIP and its mainstream
contenders. Subsection 4.3 will focus on the agenda impact of UKIP as far as the immigration
issue is concerned. To this end, I will first review the various parties’ immigration platforms
ahead of general elections from 2005 to 2015. Then, I will seek to gauge possible agenda
shifts over time, by means of a LIBRES scale specified in the methodology part. Finally, I
will empirically test the cited hypotheses, by drawing on the parties’ electoral results, as well
as on survey data concerning issue ownership and public saliency of the immigration issue
over time. The same process will be followed in subsection 4.4, which deals with the agenda
impact of UKIP on the EU issue. A EUROSC scale will replace the LIBRES scale to
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consider parties’ preferences on the EU. Finally, a conclusive section will summarize the
main findings of this thesis, also illustrating some possible limitations of the present inquiry.
2. Defining the Populist Radical Right (PRR)
Parties such as the French National Front (NF), the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ),
the UK Independence Party (UKIP) and the Italian Northern League (NL) have recently
emerged as prominent actors in Western Europe. They feature more and more in public as
well as academic debate. These parties are generally considered as members of a distinct
family, indicated by a wide array of labels: extreme right, far-right, anti-immigration,
nationalist, xenophobic, populist, fascist and so forth. While consensus on proper definitions
is still lacking, most observers agree that these parties do share certain policy objectives and
rhetoric traits. These parties have attracted a great deal of resonance due to their staggering
electoral rise in Western European democracies since the late 1980s (Betz 1994, Norris 2005,
Kitschelt 2007, Art 2011). In countries like Austria, Denmark and Switzerland, they have
managed to garner around one-fifth or one-fourth of the total vote between the 1990s and the
2000s. However, success has been more limited in most other European democracies, owing
both to external constraints --such as majority electoral rules or high threshold to
representation-- and organizational or leadership variables at party level.
Achieving a more accurate theorization of this political phenomenon is deemed
necessary to improve and harness the vibrant academic debate on the topic. Before delving
into the study of potential political impact of populist radical right parties in West European
democracies, it is thus crucial to better understand the ideology which underlies the
programmes of such parties. By drawing on the relevant literature, I will attempt to point out
the core features of these parties, in order to devise an operational definition of the party
family of the populist radical right (PRR).
The goal of this descriptive section is to clarify the nature of the populist radical right
and offer an overview of these parties’ stances on international problems such as EU
integration and immigration. The section is divided into three parts: first, I will discuss some
of the major problems in trying to conceptualize and categorize the populist radical right,
while also presenting some of the most interesting academic contributions in this respect.
Second, I will provide an overview of the ideological fabric of this party family, which is
constituted by a dynamic combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism. Finally, I
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will verify if these ideological characteristics are actually observed in the parties commonly
included within this party family.
2.1. Ideology as a parameter for classification
A great deal of existing literature on populist radical right parties is devoted to
classification efforts and aims to define the most relevant features which distinguish PRR
parties from other parties. This section builds on this strand of research and seeks to single
out the smallest common denominator of those parties generally associated with the populist
radical right. Therefore, here I will lay down the necessary and sufficient elements which any
party should display to be included in the populist radical right family.
In this thesis, attempts at classification will be guided by the observation of the
ideological appeal of these parties, rather than by the analysis of the common socioeconomic
characteristics of their voting base. The latter approach followed the traditional cleavage
models like the one elaborated by Lipset and Rokkan (1967). These accounts insisted on the
link between socioeconomic conditions and party choice, assuming a close tie between
parties and their class-based constituencies. However, class-based voting and rigid party
preference were downplayed by far-reaching social changes such as de-industrialization and
the atomization of the working class, prompting scholars to search for alternative cleavages
not based on social class (Rokkan 1997, Kriesi 2010, Evans & De Graaf 2013). More
specifically, in countries such as Norway and Denmark, this pattern of social-structuring
voting has declined dramatically to the point of fading away (Aardal, 2003; Andersen &
Borre, 2003). Related to this, classifying parties by looking at key characteristics of their
electorates is complicated by the increasing trend of electoral volatility, whereby voters are
much more prone to switch their vote even in the short term (Mair 2002). Therefore, if one
considers the political arena as an electoral market (Norris 2005), this study shifts the
attention to the supply of parties, determined by their programmatic and ideological positions.
This supply-side approach is here employed both to conceptualize the populist radical right
and to later assess its impact on the policy agenda of other parties.
While authors have tried to overcome such limitations by connecting these parties to
new post-materialist or value-based cleavages (Inglehart 1990, Ignazi 1992, Minkenberg
1992), a large number of scholars point out that the link between social structures and voting
choices has grown more and more feeble, so that the cleavage approach to party
classifications has lost some of its appeal (Mair & Mudde 1998: 216, Jungar & Jupskas
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2014). With this in mind, it is safe to conclude that the socioeconomic or sociocultural
characteristics of the voters are not appropriate criteria to theorize the category of PRR
parties. The present work hence looks at the distinctive ideological attributes to outline the
prototypical PRR party. This is indeed a preliminary step necessary to later develop the
empirical part of this thesis.
Despite the richness in the relevant literature, the populist radical right family turns
out to be particularly difficult to define, and consensus is still limited around the most
appropriate criteria to distinguish it from other categories of parties. Before going through the
most important literature contributions on the classification of these parties, it is worth
underlining a basic demarcation line which separates the parties here analyzed from other far-
right formations. Specifically, most researchers have made a case for dividing far-right
parties into two different categories: “extreme right” parties and “radical right” parties (cfr.
Eatwell 2000, March and Mudde 2005). The former label refers to those fringe parties at the
far-right end of the political spectrum, with the crucial specification that these parties
generally contest the democratic “rules of the game” and may endorse the use of violence to
gain power or counter their opposition. Extreme right parties have often inner circles which
keep ties with neo-fascist formations or violent militants. In contrast, parties within the
radical right category generally accept the basic democratic principles (e.g. multiparty
system, majority rule, government alternation), while still voicing contempt for many aspects
of the current constitutional order. While such distinction is undoubtedly useful, it may
sometimes be difficult to discriminate between the two categories, as extremist parties may
decide to disguise their true political ambitions. This work exclusively deals with the latter
category, and more specifically with the “populist” variant of radical right parties.
2.2. Classification issues
In stressing the definitional complexity surrounding this category, Hainsworth notes
that parties which are generally included in it tend to be quite heterogeneous and thus
difficult to capture under a single, satisfactory definition (2000: 4). Another source of
complexity has been often ascribed to the fact that parties such as the National Front, the
Northern League, and the Party for Freedom do not display a shared ideological pedigree nor
are united in the same international party organization, as much as social democratic or
conservative liberal parties do (Mudde 2000, Norris 2005: 43). Partly owing to this
complexity, most conceptual frameworks of this political phenomenon are plagued by a
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considerable “terminological chaos” (Mudde 2007: 12). Lack of clear-cut definitions and
conceptual confusion have thus generated a plethora of different names for this kinds of
parties, such as: “extreme right” (Schain et al. 2002a), “national populism” (Taguieff 1984),
“neopopulism” (Betz & Immerfall 1998), “xenophobic populism” (DeAngelis 2003), “anti-
immigrant” (Gibson 2002, Fennema 1997), “populist nationalism” (Blokker 2005), and
“fascist” (Ford 1992, Laqueur 1996). As noted by Mudde (2007: 12), some authors even refer
to these types of parties in more than one way within the same study.
Norris (2005) detects similar terminological shortcomings in this field of research.
Theorization of these types of parties often falls prey to circularity insofar as labels like
fascist, racist, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic tend to be employed without prior
justification. Therefore, a more suitable term is found in the “radical right”, first popularized
by Bell (1963). According to Norris (2005), considering these parties as radical right avoids
prejudging their programmatic profile, and simply implies that they are placed on the far-
right end of the political left-right continuum. The term radical right hence better serves the
purposes of scientific inquiry compared to the colorful variants mentioned above, which are
often the product of value judgments and seem to belie a pejorative connotation (Decker
2007). This study avails itself of the same terminology for the benefits just illustrated.
However, the present study is concerned with a specific variant of the radical right –the
populist radical right--, namely those parties which also add a populist doctrine to their
ideological profile.
2.3. Towards a PRR family: major contributions
If one has to assess the political impact of populist radical right parties by means of
comparative research, it is indeed crucial to first find a concise and working definition of
what these parties are and what politics they embrace. This definition will also need to be
universal and able to travel across different national contexts if it is to employed for purposes
of comparison. In this regard, terms like anti-immigrant parties (Fennema 2000, 2003) appear
ill-suited as they may not be easily applied to geographical contexts where immigration does
not represent a salient issue in electoral campaigns and policy debate. By the same token,
besides the risks of circularity just explained, defining these populist radical right parties as
fascist may not be a wise decision as the term does not tell much in contexts which did not
experience fascism in the first place.
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