Vote for the Far-Right Parties in the 2014 European Elections

• • 
  • Presentation speakers
    • Evgenia Eleni Mavropoulou, Department of Government, University of Essex, UK

  Abstract:

  Over the last three decades, European democracies have been facing the political emergence and the uneven electoral success of far-right parties. A great number of research studies have been focusing on the explanation of the determinants that contribute to the timeless political survivor of the right-wing phenomenon. This thesis will concentrate on the electoral performance of the far-right parties and mainly radical right parties in the 2014 European Parliament elections. Since the recent European elections were conducted amid a multilevel crisis, it was expected that the outburst of the Great Recession in conjunction with the decline of the mainstream political system would create more political opportunities for the right-wing family. To investigate the factors that tend to determine the positive electoral presence of these parties, we will focus on the aspects of the bidirectional relationship between the demand and supply-side theory. To illustrate that, according to the demand-side perspective, we will discuss the extent of immigration and unemployment salience, issues that monopolized the policy agenda of the recent European elections. Supplementary, our research interest will concentrate on the supply-side developments referring to the ideological positioning of parties and the subsequent configuration of party competition. More specifically, we are interested in examining how the position of the major center-right, center-left and far-right party influence the electoral trend towards the right-wing family, by focusing on two main issue-dimensions, namely immigration and the redistribution of the wealth. For this reason, we proceed to a further step as we associated data from the 2014 European Manifesto Survey with the European Election Survey, to present the configuration of party completion wedded to the views of voters in the economic and the sociocultural dimension. Therefore, the analysis provides results from which we can deduce several inferences regarding the presence of the far-right spectrum in the party systems of all member-states of the European Union.

 

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