Responding to the Radical Right Challenge: Party Shifts and Voter Reactions

In seeking to curtail the success of radical right challengers, many parties pursue accommodative strategies - they coopt radical right issue positions in an attempt to gain or regain voters. It is, however, unclear whether these strategies yield the desired effects of winning back previous radical right voters or of expanding parties’ electorate. In order to address these question, we study the repercussions of party shifts with respect to issues of national identity on voter migration between parties, combining micro-level data on electoral behavior from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems with data on party platforms from the Comparative Manifesto Project. The findings of our comparative inquiry show that ‘going tough’ on issues of national identity has little to no pay-off: Parties that employ these strategies are not significantly more successful at swaying voters from the radical right, non-voters, or from other parties. This holds for members of all major party families alike.