Competition Between Unequals: The Role of Mainstream Party Strategy in Niche Party Success

Abstract

What accounts for variation in the electoral success of niche parties? Although institutional and sociological explanations of single-issue party strength have been dominant, they tend to remove parties from the analysis. In this article, I argue that the behavior of mainstream parties influences the electoral fortunes of the new, niche party actors. In contrast to standard spatial theories, my theory recognizes that party tactics work by altering the salience and ownership of issues for political competition, not just party issue positions. It follows that niche party support can be shaped by both proximal and non-proximal competitors. Analysis of green and radical right party vote in 17 Western European countries from 1970 to 2000 confirms that mainstream party strategies matter; the modified spatial theory accounts for the failure and success of niche parties across countries and over time better than institutional, sociological, and even standard spatial explanations.

Voices from the far right: a text analysis of Swedish parliamentary debates

“…Conversely, engagement strategies may co-opt the radical right's policies or require collaboration with the radical right party in the legislative, executive, or electoral arena. There have been different attempts to develop Downs' classification (Meguid 2005, Bale et al 2010, Goodwin 2011, Grabow & Hartleb 2013, Saveljeff 2011, Heinze 2018, where the significant conceptual variety in existing case studies depends on different theoretical assumptions and operationalization (Heinze 2018, p. 290). In this article, we use the classification proposed by Meguid (2005Meguid ( , 2008 as our point of departure.…”

“…According to Meguid (2005), for mainstream parties there are three principal strategies to choose from when responding to niche parties, e.g. green, radical right, and ethno-territorial parties.…”

“…How mainstream parties respond to the rise of the radical right and whether they adapt to their policy positions is a matter of scholarly debate (Van Spanje 2010, Rooduijn et al 2012, Bale et al 2010, Schumacher & Van Kersbergen 2016. Whatever the outcome, there is strong evidence that the success of radical right parties depends on the way the mainstream parties respond to them (Meguid 2005, Bale et al 2010, Abou-Chadi 2016, Han 2015, Loxbo 2014, Schumacher & Van Kersbergen 2016. In this article, we address mainstream party strategy, but from a somewhat different angle; while most previous studies have focused on electoral campaigns and policy proposals, we investigate parliamentary debates.…”

“…To examine this, we bring together concepts from two different research fields: the classification of mainstream party strategies vis-à-vis niche parties, developed by Meguid (2005Meguid ( , 2008, combined with communication theory concepts (Weaver 2007).…”

“…However, as mentioned by King et al (2016), using key terms to isolate important parts of a corpus can often be misleading and can lead to biased results. Therefore, we estimate a probabilistic topic model based on the whole corpus, tailored to the theory of Meguid (2005) that tries to capture both the salience and the framing of the topic of immigration in the parliament. This allows us to analyze a large amount of text without any manual classification, tagging or coding of individual speeches, but at the same time, we are using the actual speeches of the parliamentarians instead of interviews, thereby reducing potential biases such as acquiescence bias and memory-related biases.…”