Radical Right Populist Parties in the 21st Century: The Policy Influence of Populists in Switzerland and France

Since the beginning of the 1980s, radical right populist parties have developed and strengthened their electoral weight in Europe (Mudde, 2013). However, since the end of the 1990s, they have also started to be more and more legitimized and to gain access to legislative and executive powers (Widfeldt, 2010). This is the case, for instance, in Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, The Netherlands or in Scandinavian countries. In other countries, they face more difficulties to reach power but tend to be considered by mainstream parties as a serious electoral threat. Because of their proximity with power, the role and the influence of radical right populist parties on policy-making becomes a puzzling question. My paper thus aims to investigate the influence of such parties on policy-making, in a comparative perspective. Two dissimilar cases are compared. The French Front national (FN), a party traditionally marginalized in the institutions at the national level, is compared to the Swiss Union démocratique du centre (UDC), the major political party at the National Council and member of the Swiss federal government for several decades. Based on the process tracing method (Beach & Pederson, 2013), the influence of these parties at several stages of the policy-making process in the law and order sector is firstly assessed. Then, the way they try to be influent is analyzed. If both of these parties are particularly influent at the agenda setting stage of policy-making, their influence capacity tends to diverge at the following stages. This distinction mainly results from the voting system and from the fact the direct democracy tools are available in Switzerland and, therefore, can be mobilized by the SVP in order to influence the entire policy-making process.