Economic Crisis, Immigration Flows and the Electoral Success of Far Right, Far Left, and Populist Parties
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The electoral success of far right, far left, and populist parties is increasingly visible in Europe. These parties won on average of 21.4% of the vote in the parliamentary el ections in the EU28 countries between 2008 and 2014. Their electoral success continued in following years 2015 and 2016, with Spanish far left We can winning 20.7%, Irish populist Sinn Féin 13.8%, and Slovakia far right Peoples Party Our Slovakia 8.0% of the vote. Three reasons are recently discussed as determinants of the electoral success: economic crisis, immigration flows, and uncovered tensions in the European society. We concentrate on first two topics. Economic crisis struck Europe in 2008 and it la sted in some countries for more than 4 years. Majority of the EU28 countries has experienced a recovery in the previous two years but the benefits of economic growth are unequally distributed in the societies. Living standard of many voters deteriorated an d their scepticism persist for the future. They blame mainstream political parties for hardship and look for an alternative. Far right, far left or populist parties usually offer them radical program changes. We analyse how the economic crisis influenced c hanges in the electoral support of these parties. Our research includes the 28EU countries plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland in period 2000 - 2014. Besides economic variables, we concentrate on the importance of immigration in the electoral success of the se parties as well. We distinguish three options: actual inflows of immigrants to constituent country, the number of foreigners living in the country, and perception of immigration We use the econometric model in form of Tobit with a maximum likelihood es timator because of the large number of left centered dependent observations. |
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