To fight or not to fight for issue ownership: Analyses of New Politics Parties and Extreme Right Parties across 15 West European democracies

Advanced democracies have witnessed new types of political issues such as environmental protection and immigration being represented and integrated in their party systems in the past decades. Yet, their patterns still remain unknown as to the conditions in which new political issues are first represented and eventually integrated in each party system. To fill this gap, this paper illustrates such patterns through different phases of socio-economic transformation, party system responses to newly emerging issues, and electoral systems’ openness. By applying a ‘double-hurdle’ model (Jones, 1989), the paper tries to elucidate the mechanisms in which new political issues are represented in the first hurdle and then integrated in party systems in the second hurdle. To this end, the paper will analyse new challenger parties including New Politics Parties (NPPs) and Extreme Right Parties (ERPs) across 15 West European democracies. The preliminary analyses reveal that New Politics issues are represented through NPPs when existing party systems are not responsive to the new issues such as environmental and left-libertarian issues. On the contrary, NPPs further grow and New Politics issues are integrated in party systems when existing party systems are more responsive to these newly emerging issues. The patterns for ERPs differ as they both emerge and grow when existing parties are not responsive to the neo-conservative and neo-liberal issues. Based on the contrasting results, the paper discusses that NPPs further grow when existing parties respond to the new issues since New Politics issues are generally valence issues while ERPs further grow when existing parties do not respond since Extreme-Right issues tend to be positional issues. In other words, NPPs benefit from not holding their ‘issue ownership’ once they enter the party system while ERPs benefit from keeping their ‘issue ownership’ in further increasing their seat share. The contrasting results between NPPs and ERPs could shed light on varying scenarios in which ‘issue ownership’ works for new challenger parties and how issues can be further integrated. If the issues are of consensus type, new challenger parties could be better off if existing parties follow their path. Once new challenger parties establish their issue ownership, they could manage to have their policy integrated into the whole party system by highlighting its salience. If the issues are of positional type, new challenger parties could be better off if existing parties neglect the new issues as they could stand in the electoral market as the only seller of such issues. In this perspective, it is reasonable to understand that some of extreme right and right-wing populist leaders choose the anti-establishment rhetoric and strategically distance themselves from the existing parties. It could be thus that new challenger parties are adopting their strategies according to the types of issues they are trying to address. The paper discusses the implications of these divergent results.