Ditching the Plane: Policy-Package Innovation by the Dutch Freedom Party

What is the ‘winning formula’ of modern day successful anti-immigrant parties? In literature on the recent success of several European anti-immigrant parties, it is often assumed that these parties have found an electoral sweet spot by combining cultural authoritarianism with economically center or even left-wing positions. The premise of this paper is that the strategy of at least one of these parties, the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV) of Geert Wilders, has been considerably more innovative. Particularly in the years before this party took part in a government coalition, its political positioning has not been characterized by a remarkable position in this two-dimensional issue space (culturally authoritarian, economically left-wing), but by offering a radically new policy package that combines positions on underlying issues in new ways. By systematically studying original data on categorized roll call voting of all parties in the Dutch parliament (2005-2012, N=10156), this paper shows how the PVV successfully combines authoritarian positions on some issues with libertarian positions regarding other issues on the cultural axis and combines issue positions that can be considered economically right wing with economically left wing positions and as such defies the notion of a two-dimensional issue space altogether.