What Unites Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe?

Abstract

Unlike for the green party family, no empirically backed scholarly consensus exists about the grievances mobilized by populist right parties in Western Europe. To the contrary, three competing grievance mobilization models can be distinguished in the existing literature. These models focus on grievances arising from economic changes, political elitism and corruption, and immigration. This study discusses these three grievance mobilization models and tests them on comparable cross-sectional survey data for all seven relevant countries using multinomial probit analysis. The study finds that no populist right party performed well in elections around 2002 without mobilizing grievances over immigration. However, it finds several examples of populist right parties experiencing electoral success without mobilizing grievances over economic changes or political elitism and corruption. This study therefore solves a long-standing disagreement in the literature by comprehensively showing that only the appeal on the immigration issue unites all successful populist right parties.