The Populist Radical Right: Programmatic Evolution of a Heterogeneous Party Family

Scholarship on the Populist Radical Right (PRR) has established anti-immigration preferences as the central element of PRR parties’ ideology. These parties come to be identified with this issue, which they are considered to “own”. Arguably, their nativist agenda unifies PRR parties into a somewhat coherent party family. However, PRR parties put forward consistent and comprehensive ideological programs, which go beyond a “single issue”. While the original “winning formula” of PRR parties has been largely debunked, recent contributions focus on the increased salience of economic for PRR parties, and they argue that some parties have moved to more centrist, blurred, or left position. However, the fuzziness of the programmatic consistency of the PRR party family is an incentive to establish clearly party positions in a longitudinal and comparative fashion. This paper relies on an original dataset of party positions collected through transnational Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) designed for the 2009, 2014, and 2019 elections to the European Parliament. Party positions are elaborated thanks to an iterative methodology (combination of expert coding and party self-placement) for every competing party. We find that there is a large programmatic heterogeneity within PRR parties in Europe. We also find that some PRR parties have operated a pendulum-like issue repositioning: they strategically shifted to more economically “leftist” positions after the great recession, but shifted back to their originally blurred policy proposals in the following decade.