The Influence of Radical Right Populist Parties on Policy-Making in Europe

In the last three decades, radical right populist parties (RRPP) have emerged, developed, and strengthened their electoral weight in Europe (Mudde, 2013). This tendency has been highly criticized, since RRPP are often perceived as being a threat to democracy (Albertazzi and Mueller, 2013). Scholars have addressed the populist phenomenon through different angles. However, the influence of these parties on policy-making remains understudied. Indeed, there is a need to go beyond the knowledge of these parties themselves in order to understand whether they have an effect in terms of public policies. This is key to enter into the public debate about the party system and democracy as well as to help citizens to better apprehend the political forces. Recently, a few empirical studies have started to investigate the bridge between politics and policies. While these contributions can be seen as a first step in this research area, they suffer from a lack of methodological coherence and contextual diversity. Therefore, this workshop proposes to analyse the influence of European RRPP on policy-making by focusing on the issues of immigration, Europe, and law and order, given that these domains are considered the core issues of these parties (Mudde, 2007). The goal of the workshop is to contribute to empirical research in this field by bringing together researchers whose papers revolve around the following questions: Do RRPP succeed in influencing policy-making? How do these parties manage to exercise this influence? Can we distinguish between direct and indirect forms? Which contextual conditions make such influence more likely to occur?