​Exclusionary Rhetoric Use by Any Political Party Increases Votes for Far-Right Parties​

The rise of right-wing populist parties in Europe led some mainstream political parties to attempt to regain the support of voters by adopting far-right pro-nationalist and anti-immigrant stances. However, new research out of Germany and Israel suggests this strategy primarily benefits far-right parties and not the political mainstream parties, as they had hoped. Using survey data from native-born residents in 26 European countries between 1995 and 2017 in combination with party manifesto data, the researchers found that when mainstream parties take nationalist, anti-immigration positions, they likely unintentionally boost the electoral chances of far-right party competitors.

Der Aufstieg rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Europa hat dazu geführt, dass einige etablierte politische Parteien versuchen, die Unterstützung der Wähler*innen zurückzugewinnen, indem sie rechtsextreme, pro-nationalistische und einwanderungsfeindliche Positionen einnehmen. Neue Forschungsergebnisse aus Deutschland und Israel deuten jedoch darauf hin, dass diese Strategie in erster Linie den rechtsextremen Parteien zugute kommt und nicht, wie erhofft, den Parteien der politischen Mitte. Anhand von Umfragedaten von Einwohner*innen ohne Migrationshintergrund in 26 europäischen Ländern zwischen 1995 und 2017 in Kombination mit Daten aus Parteiprogrammen fanden die Forschenden heraus, dass Mainstream-Parteien, die nationalistische und einwanderungsfeindliche Positionen vertreten, wahrscheinlich ungewollt die Wahlchancen rechtsextremer Parteien erhöhen.

DOI: 10.34879/gesisblog.2023.73

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Investigating A Far-Right Voting Behavior Puzzle

Antonia C. May of GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and Christian S. Czymara of Tel Aviv University and Goethe University in Frankfurt investigated a voter behavior puzzle: Although many Europeans hold exclusionary and restrictive notions of national identity that set high barriers to the acceptance of immigrants into national societies, overall few respondents appear to act on these notions by voting for parties with restrictive positions on immigration. This relationship seems to have changed in recent years with the success of the far right.

As right-wing vote shares increase, public debates and parties alike have discussed strategies to counteract these developments. In reaction, mainstream parties tried increasingly to win back the support of their electorates by adopting particularly more anti-immigrant and nativist positions. The research by May and Czymara now suggests that this strategy is likely to backfire. The researchers contend that as immigration becomes more politicized through the adoption of mainstream parties, national identity becomes more important in voting, particularly to the benefit of far-right parties due to the prevalence of exclusionary notions of national identity among voters.

To better understand what connects exclusionary notions of national identity with vote choice, May and Czymara investigated how and when these identities become relevant to voting decisions. Their main argument concerns the role of political elites who increase the relevance of national identity in the electoral process by adopting exclusionary positions from their right-wing competitors in their electoral programs. This draws attention to immigration and nationality. Especially during election campaigns, political elites are key players in framing national discourses. The authors noted that picking up on anti-immigrant and pro-national positions in reaction to far-right success contributed to the general salience of these issues and a hostile climate in the public sphere. This, in turn, is argued to temporarily strengthen the relationship between national identity and voting. The authors argue that political elite discourse is decisive in activating national identity to become more relevant to vote choice. In line with social psychology findings that identities need to be activated by external factors to guide behavior, the hostile political discourse is seen as a factor that triggers reflection on the boundaries of the national ingroup, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of voting accordingly. The result is that narrower notions of national identity are more likely to be activated and are suspected of harsher attitudes towards immigration.

Combining Comparative Manifesto Project Data with ONBound’s Harmonized Survey Data

To test whether the relationship between exclusionary national identity and far-right voting is conditional on its prior activation through increasingly exclusionary political elite discourse, the authors used data from the ONBound project. That project combined harmonized individual-level survey data from (inter alia) the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) and the European Values Study (EVS). Using the membership boundary questions from both survey programs, May and Czymara found that different notions of nationhood are present in all European countries – including a highly prevalent and highly exclusionary type of notions of national identity that sets high barriers to accepting others as part of their national ingroup. To identify far-right voting preferences of the respondents, the authors used the classification as “far-right” by the PopuList project.

To measure exclusionary political elite discourse, the authors used data from the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP). The CMP provides quantitative content analyses of election manifestos for parties competing in democratic elections, including EU member states. To measure anti-immigration and pro-national positions, May and Czymara combined two items from the CMP data: first, positive statements about a national way of life and second, negative statements about multiculturalism. The final measure takes the values of the two items (per party, per election), weighted by the party’s vote share. This was done to account for the fact that the more prominent a party is, the more prominent its arguments are in the national discourse.

By combining these two datasets, the authors produced a longitudinal comparative dataset of over 127,000 individuals over 26 years and across 26 countries.

Activation of National Identity for Vote Choices

May and Czymara tested their activation hypothesis, that the link between narrow notions of national identity and far-right voting is particularly strong when political elites use exclusionary rhetoric, by using individual level and within-country estimators on the national level in longitudinal fixed effects models.

Controlling for relevant contexts, such as national immigration or unemployment rates in each of the countries in the study, the authors first confirmed, that, in particular, those with exclusionary notions of nationhood are more likely to choose a far-right party. Second, the increased presence of hostile positions on immigration and positive stances on nationality in the public increase the prevalence of far-right voting in general. Finally, they found that when European political elites – of any party – take exclusionary positions, voters who hold more narrow notions of national identity are likely to go on to express a significantly stronger preference for a far-right party than when such rhetoric was not widely promoted. Their analyses show that both a voter’s ideas about who counts as a compatriot and the political elites’ rhetoric influence far-right voting preferences – but that the combination of the two is particularly powerful. In other words, such exclusionary political elite discourses activate individuals with nativist images of the nation.

In sum, when political leaders across parties adopt exclusionary rhetoric, the likelihood of voters shifting towards far-right parties increases significantly, especially among those who uphold narrow conceptions of national identity. Rather than attracting voters of the far-right by adopting more right-wing positions, mainstream parties seem to further strengthen their far-right competitors and are likely to hurt themselves first and foremost.

To learn more about results for each of the tested hypotheses and a more detailed analysis of the findings of this research, read the full article, available free of charge, in Nations and Nationalism: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nana.12985

To learn more about or to use the ONBound data, visit the website:
https://www.gesis.org/en/services/processing-and-analyzing-data/data-harmonization/onbound