In the course of the past two decades, right-wing populist parties have gained sizable shares of the vote in France, Switzerland, and Austria. In the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn has succeeded in breaking into a party system whose segmentation and “pillarization” once made it an example of stability. Throughout much of the postwar period, Switzerland and Austria had also been marked by high stability in party alternatives. In these countries, as well as in Denmark, Norway, Italy, and Belgium, the success of new parties of the right has largely surpassed that of older parties of the extreme right, which seemed to...

Two propositions are tested in this chapter by way of an empirical analysis of the dimensions structuring political space around the 1990s in six Western European countries. The first is that right-wing populist parties are located in a distinct position in political space. Together with two further criteria—their anti-establishment discourse and their hierarchical internal structure—they can thus be considered a common party family. Among the six countries studied in this chapter, the “candidates” for inclusion in the extreme-right-wing populist party family are the French Front National, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), the Swiss People’s Party (SVP), and the...

The mobilization of the historical cleavages identified by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (1967), in processes lasting to the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, have given birth to the modern party systems in Europe. Subsequently, the full mobilization of European electorates led to a “freezing” of the major party alternatives. A crucial characteristic of Western European competitive politics, according to Lipset and Rokkan (1990 [1967]: 134), is that “the party alternatives, and in remarkably many cases the party organizations, are older than the majorities of national electorates.”

Assuming a zero-sum relationship between...

This chapter lays out and illustrates the procedure and the methods used in the subsequent country analyses. Adopting the structure of the chapters to come, the discussion has three main parts. The first step is to investigate the dimensionality of political space and to determine the positions parties take within it. I therefore start by describing in more detail than in Chapter 2 the campaign data used in this study and discuss at some length the interpretation of the configurations resulting from the Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) analysis.

The second section illustrates, step by step, the measurement of the elements needed...

In much of the twentieth century, France hardly qualified as an example of a stable party system, and it has not been uncommon to see new parties rise and old parties fall. The institutions of the Fifth Republic, however—the two-round majoritarian formula used in national parliamentary elections and in presidential contests—did progressively bring about a more stable pattern of “bipolar multipartism” after 1958 (Knapp 2002; Parodi 1989). The era of stability proved to be short-lived, however, as new cultural conflicts appeared in the early 1980s. Since then, different conceptions of norms that should be binding in society, of...

Of the countries studied in this book, Switzerland stands for a case in which an established party has mobilized and absorbed the political potentials related to the new cultural conflicts that have emerged since the 1960s. In the course of this process, the Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People’s Party; SVP) has evolved from a conservative agrarian party into an extreme-right-wing populist party. Many studies of the SVP converge in their assessment that the party has undergone a profound transformation, which centers on the preservation of Swiss traditions against the challenges of immigration and supranational integration in the European Union.

Popular discord...

Despite the attention regularly devoted to the extreme right in Germany both in the media and in scholarly research, its electoral support has remained rather limited in the postwar era, and its successes have been confined to singular events. In the 1980s, this situation changed somewhat, when support for the Republikaner (Republican Party) appeared to mirror the rise of right-wing populist parties in other countries (Kitschelt with McGann 1995). However, the Republicans proved incapable of consolidating their success in the 1990s. This failure is often attributed to the competition within the extreme right in Germany. However, even the combined support...