Subnational political opportunity structures and the success of the radical right: Evidence from the March 2004 regional elections in France

Abstract

Abstract. This article attempts to explain the impact of department‐level political opportunity structures on the electoral success of the French Front National (FN) in the 2004 regional elections. The concept of ‘political opportunity structure’ refers to the degree of openness of a particular political system and the external institutional or socio‐economic constraints and opportunities that it sets for political parties. Comparative analysis across subnational units is conducted where the 94 departments of mainland France are the units of analysis. The significance of electoral institutions (district magnitude), party competition (effective number of parties), electoral behaviour (turnout) and socioeconomic conditions (immigration and unemployment) on the ability of the FN to gather votes across the departments is assessed by means of multiple regression. The empirical results show that the subnational political opportunity structures have been of great importance for the FN. Some four out of the five independent variables are statistically significant and explain a great deal of the variance in the two dependent variables (electoral support for FN list and index of electoral success). Turnout and district magnitude are negatively correlated with the electoral fortunes of the FN, while unemployment and the effective number of party lists are positively correlated with the success of the FN in the regional elections. The variable that indicates the share of non‐European immigrants does not provide additional explanatory power in a statistically significant way.

The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Meta-Analysis of Structural Factors

“…(e.g. Kestilä and Söderlund, 2007). Other measurements include the level of support for RWPs among white voters (Bowyer, 2008), or the change in the electoral support for a specific radical RWP between two consecutive elections (e.g.…”

How (not) to operationalise subnational political opportunity structures: A critique of Kestilä and Söderlund's study of regional elections

“…It should be noted that while the results that relate to the district magnitude are in line with the findings of some other studies (e.g., Arzheimer & Carter 2006), those that pertain to unemployment and immigration are not: in country‐level analyses, the effect of unemployment is subject to on‐going discussion, and the effect of immigration has been consistently found to be strong and positive. From their results, and the findings of other studies notwithstanding, Kestilä and Söderlund (2007: 790) argue that the ‘subnational political opportunity structure has been of great importance for the FN’ and more generally, that the subnational approach ‘is able to control a wider range of factors pertaining to the political system and tends to provide more reliable results’.…”

“…Our first misgiving concerns the inclusion of (regional) party system fragmentation in their model, operationalised by the variable ‘effective number of party lists’. As Kestilä and Söderlund (2007: 784) suggest, the level of party system fragmentation might indeed be important to small or new parties either because a high level of fragmentation at the previous election might indicate that the system is open and therefore more favourable to such parties or, conversely, because a high level of fragmentation might indicate that a wide variety of alternatives already exists, rendering it difficult for a small or new party to make a breakthrough. However, using this variable in relation to the FN is problematic because, as Kestilä and Söderlund (2007: 775) point out, the FN is neither small nor new: it is a well established political competitor that has acquired the status of third political force in many parts of France.…”

“…Analysing the influence that features of the national political context exert on the vote for Western Europe's ‘extreme’ or ‘radical’ right 1 parties is now a minor industry (see, e.g., Arzheimer & Carter 2006; Golder 2003; Jackman & Volpert 1996; Knigge 1998; Lubbers et al. 2002; Swank & Betz 2003), but in a recent contribution to this journal, Kestilä and Söderlund (2007) argue that research should give more consideration to what they call ‘subnational political opportunity structures’. According to Kestilä and Söderlund (2007: 774–775), focusing on the subnational context within one country mitigates against three problems that trouble the existing contextual analyses: first, at the subnational level, the number of contexts is large in comparison to the number of relevant variables; second, unique features of the party system are obviously held constant; and third, the heterogeneity of the radical right party family need not be of concern.…”

Scapegoat-Based Policy Making in Hungary

“…The former typically use formal models and the statistical analysis of vote share and turnout data (Coffé, Heyndels and Vermeir, 2007;Kestila and Söderlund, 2007;Arzheimer and Carter, 2009;Jesuit, Paradowski and Mahler, 2009;Rydgren and Ruth, 2011 (Goodwin, 2010;Art, 2011;De Lange and Art, 2011;Dinas and Rori, 2016;Ellinas and Lamprianou, 2016). This line of research usually highlights the links between leadership and local organizations: how solid (extra-parliamentary) organizations have resulted in the party's persistence at the national electoral level (Art, 2011;Bolleyer and Bytzek, 2013), or how local far-right party organizations have reacted to national leadership crises (Heinisch and Mazzoleni, 2016).…”