The radical right: both winners and losers in northern Europe

Noxon, Clarissa Miles (2020) The radical right: both winners and losers in northern Europe. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Radical right-wing parties have been increasing their electoral success across Europe over the last few decades. Despite the widely covered surge in their success, many radical right-wing parties have achieved marginal to no electoral success, but there continues to be a lack of research trying to explain their failure. The question guiding this thesis focuses on why there is varied electoral success of radical right-wing parties across Europe and suggests that it could be explained through differences in the importance of economic compared to cultural-political issues in each country. To investigate this, the work uses data from public opinion surveys and party manifesto content from three countries which saw different radical right-wing party success in elections between 2005 and 2011 - Finland, Norway, and Iceland. Tentative findings indicate that cultural issues were the most salient in the public and amongst parties in the country with the most electorally successful radical right-wing party, Norway. Broadly, however, the public is still much more focused on economic issues than cultural issues, but political party rhetoric is much more evenly divided. Partisanship is the most influential factor on vote choice and though issue salience was rarely significant in vote choice, it was nearly always significant when trying to explain partisanship. Though issue salience is not directly influencing vote choice, it is influencing partisanship which has a strong impact on vote choice.

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