Measuring Party Nationalist Policy Positions Across Regions: A Comparative Analysis Using the Political Representation, Executives, and Political Parties Survey (PREPPS)

Parties that share a common emphasis on national sovereignty, the ‘national preference’ and scepticism of supra-national institutions are on the rise globally. Consequently, the emergence of nationalism as a structuring fault line has important implications for democratic politics. The ideologies and programmatic agendas of these “new nationalism” parties combine elements of nationalism, xenophobia/ immigration-scepticism, and populism. While, however, there is a wealth of expert survey work on identifying, measuring immigration-scepticism and populism, nationalism is much less examined. This gap is pertinent given the increasing global presence of new nationalist parties and subsequent questions of comparability of parties and leaders across world regions. This paper uses the Political Representation, Executives, and Political Parties Survey (PREPPS) to map nationalist policy positions across 50 countries in Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Australia, Canada, Israel, Turkey, and the United States of America. Specifically, the survey’s multi-dimensional approach allows us to not only identify degrees of nationalism and measure its constitutive elements across regions, but also explore how different policy issues and populism relate to nationalism.