Date of Award
5-1-2025
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Bloom, Stephen
Abstract
My dissertation examines the causes behind the slows and surges of the populist radical right (PRR) success. I attempt to answer the following question in the context of the growing global legitimacy of the populist radical right (PRR). What process contributes to the slows and surges of populist radical right (PRR) legitimacy? Previous explanations have narrowed the possible conditions influencing populist radical right success in two ways. First, the available literature often analyzes separately the structural and strategic conditions behind populist radical right success. This has created a gap in the literature, especially regarding the possible interaction between the structural and the strategic factors. Second, most studies retain their focus at the level of the state. As a result, insufficient attention has been given to the consequences of increasing transnationalism and its influences on populist radical right success. My dissertation attempts to show how including the interaction of structural and strategic conditions and the effects of transnationalism can better explain the growth and decline of populist radical right parties. I argue that the interaction of structural and strategic conditions and the effects of transnationalism may contribute toward a surge of populist radical right (PRR) success even in countries that seemed to be immune to it for a long time. I conceptualize and operationalize what I call the transnational cultural localist cleavage (TCL). The transnational cultural localist cleavage forms and is sustained by an ongoing process of interactions between a variety of national and transnational actors. Individuals, political parties, transnational organizations, and governments by interacting with each other create a shared understanding of culturalist and localist issues. Culturalism and localism are umbrella terms that represent a distinct set of priorities. Culturalism places emphasis on one’s ethnic, racial, or religious group. A voter who supports culturalist positions will support issues such as tougher immigration laws or social and economic policies that place one’s ethnicity or racial group in a superior position. People prioritize localist connections with those whom they share the most in common with such as location as in a neighborhood or town they live in, or educational and market skills. Localism emphasizes a distrust of political, economic, and intellectual elites or those that are physically distant from most of the people’s day-to-day interactions. My dissertation describes how the level of party system stability impacts party competition norms among cartel parties. A cartel party is a party that is more likely to dominate the party system because of greater availability of financial state resources and collusion with other similarly powerful parties in the party system. I outline two possible norms of competition among cartel parties – antagonistic and friendly. Party systems dominated by antagonistic cartel parties are characterized by lower levels of cartelization and greater levels of party system instability. In contrast, party systems dominated by friendly cartel parties have greater levels of cartelization and greater levels of party system stability. My theory suggests that competition norms among cartels may influence their ability to counter the populist radical right (PRR). A key dynamic exists between the transnational cultural localist (TCL) cleavage and the level of party system stability. In party systems characterized by greater levels of cartelization and greater TCL cleavage influence the populist radical right (PRR) may be encouraged to focus more on transnational learning and cooperation. PRR parties may be incentivized to take up strategic resource displacement by shifting their time and effort to the transnational level rather than solely focusing on the national level. My theory argues that by spreading their time and effort outside of the state the populist radical right party may be able to positively increase its chances for success. My theory is tested using an original dataset, a multiple pooled cross-sectional time-series dataset. The dataset includes twenty-seven countries and 245 elections spanning the years 1990 – 2023 (N = 245). I test my three hypotheses using six variables (the TCL among Voters, the TCL among Cartels, Behavioral Cartelization, Financial Cartelization, Cooperation, and Learning among PRR parties) I created against five available variables (the percentage of Foreign Born population, the percentage of Unemployment, whether Ostracism or Accommodation occurred, and the extent of Party Sophistication of the PRR party) that are commonly used among populist radical right scholars. I ran a fixed effects lagged regression model. The model supports my theory of strategic resource displacement by the populist radical right parties. The increasing transnational learning between the populist radical parties and the increasing transnational cooperation between the populist radical right parties increases the total vote share that the populist radical right parties receive in national elections. Additionally, increasing behavioral cartelization and increasing values associated with transnational cultural localism (TCL) among the cartel parties of a party system help increase the total vote share of the populist radical right. In contrast, the variables of the TCL among the voters and the financial cartelization among the cartel parties are insignificant in my final model. Overall, the model findings support my theory of strategic resource displacement among the populist radical right parties and show the strength of supply-side accounts over the demand ones in helping us better explain the successes of the populist radical right. Lastly, I present my theory in the context of a comparative analysis of German and Lithuanian party systems. The focus here is on the cartel parties of both party systems, their interactions with the broader party system, and how the different relational patterns led to different outcomes regarding the success of the populist radical right. Due to the greater instability of the Lithuanian party, the cartel parties of the Homeland Union and the Social Democrats adopted a more antagonistic relational pattern. The parties utilized strategic floating as a strategy for coalition formation. This meant that the two Lithuanian cartel parties avoided forming relationships with one another and instead formed coalitions with minor parties, irrespective of whether the ideological profile matched among the coalition partners. This strategy contributed toward lower reactionary activism at the demand level and made the strategic resources displacement strategy by the PRR parties less viable in Lithuania, leading to lower success of the PRR parties overall. In contrast, the greater stability of the German party system led the cartel parties of CDU/CSU and the SPD to adopt more friendly relational patterns. The parties focused on the political rejection of opponents rather than ideological rejection. This made the German cartel parties ineffective when facing the populist radical right. Inadvertently, the political exclusion of the AfD by the cartel parties at the political level created more activism among the cultural localists at the voter level. It led the party to focus more on strategic resource displacement, focusing their time and energy on fostering transnational populist radical right contacts. The German cartel parties' closing off the political space to outsiders inadvertently contributed to AfD’s electoral success.
Access
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