Explaining the Electoral Performance of Populist Radical Right Parties in Central and East Europe: 2000-2010: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis

Nationalist political parties were able to achieve major electoral breakthroughs in elections (elections for either national parliaments and European Parliament) held in 1970s and 1980s. These electoral successes obtained by the nationalist parties led scholars to turn their attention to these political parties. Since then, a large number of studies have set out to define these political parties and to find out about the factors determining their electoral performance. The earlier studies heavily focused on the nationalist political parties in West European countries. Since the beginning of the new millennium, however, there has been a growing awareness of the necessity for the inclusion of discussions about the nationalist political parties in Central and East Europe in literature. The main goal of this paper is to contribute to growing literature on the nationalist political parties in Central and East European countries - Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia-. The fact that most of contemporary nationalist political parties differ from the interwar period’s nationalist political parties in terms of the political understandings (e.g. different approaches to democracy, racism, and etc.) has been stated in many studies. Nonetheless, the questions of how the contemporary nationalist political parties should be defined and which terms should be used for them are still under discussion. The first part of this paper contributes to this discussion by focusing on the questions of how these political parties should be defined in the context of Central and East Europe and which terms should be used in labeling them. A lot of academic studies have taken into account the sociological factors (as demand side factors) and institutional factors (as supply side factors) to explain the variations in electoral performance of the nationalist political parties across the European countries. A linear causation between the factors and nationalist political parties' electoral performance has widely been assumed. This assumption, however, prevents the studies from considering for the possibility of "conjunctural causation." In addition to this, the existing studies fail to take into account the possibility of "equafinality," meaning that different factors might cause to the same outcome in different countries. Particularly owing to this failure, the question of why a factor, which facilitates the electoral breakthrough of a nationalist political party in one country, does not work in another one have not been fully explained. The second part of the paper attempts to address these deficiencies in the context of the Central and East Europe. To do so, this paper analyzes the national parliamentary elections, which were held in Central and East European countries from the mid-1990s to 2011 by employing Qualitative Comparative Analysis research technique. Overall, the paper is composed of three parts. The first part discusses how the nationalist parties should be defined in the context of Central and East Europe and which terms should be used in labeling them. The second part discusses the findings about the factors, which might affect the electoral performance of nationalist political parties and are obtained by QCA research technique. The final part gives the concluding remarks.