Strategic Eurosceptics and polite xenophobes: Support for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the 2009 European Parliament elections

Abstract

While Euroscepticism is the most important driver of United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) support, other attitudinal drivers – namely dissatisfaction towards mainstream parties and xenophobia – are also important. Examining vote‐switching between first‐ and second‐order elections evidence is found of a distinction between two types of supporter: more affluent and middle‐class ‘strategic defectors’ from the mainstream Conservative Party who support UKIP to register their Euroscepticism, and more economically marginal and politically disaffected ‘core loyalists’ who are attracted to UKIP by its anti‐immigration rhetoric and populist anti‐establishment strategy. UKIP also succeeds in attracting core support from groups such as women who have traditionally rejected extreme right parties such as the British National Party (BNP). This suggests that UKIP is well positioned to recruit a broader and more enduring base of support than the BNP.

Modelling the dynamics of support for a right-wing populist party: the case of UKIP

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Left-wing Populism in Spain: Discursive Formations on the European Union

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“…This party is analysed under the lens of the concept of populism and prior studies on populist parties. Populism is defined in this paper as a type of political discourse and it is fundamentally understood as a two-dimensional phenomenon with a rhetorical and social -the object of the appeal - There is extensive literature on right-wing populist parties and their appeal against the European Union; these studies connect with research focused on Euroscepticism although in occasions the last is separated from the specific analysis of populist phenomena (see Ford, Goodwin and Cutts, 2012;Bertoncini and Delors, 2014). However, few studies have studied the discourse of left-wing populist parties on the EU and its historical formation in a systematic way (apart from .…”

‘This loopy idea’ an analysis of UKIP’s social media discourse in relation to rurality and climate change

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