Radical-Right Parties, Government-Seeking, and Welfare Politics

Whereas radical-right parties carved their way into the political landscape through their distinguished anti-immigration stances, many have recognized that their continuous electoral success could not have been without the substantive working-class support they have garnered. Consequently, this growing working-class presence has been accompanied by more attention to and representation on welfare issues by these parties. Yet, radical-right parties’ ways to power have thus far been through cooperation and coalitions with mainstream right-wing parties, with rather opposite economic agendas. We currently know very little about to what extent such cooperation influences the welfare politics of radical-right parties. While it has been suggested that radical-right parties adapt their welfare positions to that of their respective mainstream right-wing party, others have argued that the populist profile of these parties and their followers come with a policy purist feature, making concessions less likely due to its relatively high costs. In this paper, I seek to study how and when government inclusion chances affect radical-right parties’ welfare politics. I do so by focusing on party competition and argue that welfare accommodation is contingent on the relative immigration policy distance between a radical-right party and the mainstream right-wing party. To test this, I employ a novel dataset covering 30 Western democracies over three decades.