Economic performance, institutions, and electoral support of far-right and far-left parties at regional level
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | When the Great Recession struck Europe in 2009, we observed a resurgence of far-right and far-left parties. The latest studies show that economic performance was an important determinant of the success of far-left parties. On the other hand, far-right parties thrived better in countries with higher ethnic tension, higher immigration and lower protection of labour market. There were different institutional factors which influenced the attractiveness of far-right (length of democracy and enforcement of law) and far-left parties (corruption perception and voting system) for voters. However, all these findings were based on the level of entire countries. Following Coffé et al. (2007) we examine the effect of deterioration of the main macroeconomic indicators on electoral support of far-right and far-left parties at regional level. We suppose that the larger a country is, the more unevenly vote shares of far-right and far-left parties within the country are distributed. Moreover, we are interested in the effect of institutional factors at regional level. Are higher vote shares of far-right and far-left parties based on the autonomy a region, ability of the citizens of the region to hold responsibility for their economic independence, and on social networks? In our empirical analysis, we use the Heckit model with maximum likelihood estimator. Our research includes selected European Union countries plus Iceland, Norway and Switzerland. We observe the period from 2000 to 2014. |
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