Aktuell
15.05.2025
Institutskolloquium IfP (04.06.25) – “Coalitions of insecure voters and nationalist mobilisation: Explaining the rise of the far right in Europe and beyond”
Speaker: Prof. Daphne Halikiopoulou (University of York)
Wednesday, June 04th 2025, 16:00 c.t. / Room 124, Institut für Politikwissenschaft or online via Zoom
About the lecture:
This project aims at developing a generalisable framework for explaining far-right party support in Europe and beyond. It argues that to understand the success of the far-right globally, we need to develop a conceptual framework that extends beyond cultural grievances and anti-immigration sentiment, to a more nuanced account of the coalitions that enable these parties to gain power and the nationalist mobilisation strategies the adopt to appeal to these voters. To illustrate this argument, the presentation proceeds as follows. First, it focuses on the demand-side and more specifically the voter characteristics that drive far-right party support. This analysis illustrates that the far-right party voter base is much more diverse than initially assumed consisting of a small share of ‘core’ nationalist- or culturalist- voters and a much larger share of ‘peripheral’ or ‘protest voters’ who do not necessarily espouse hard-core nationalist principles but vote for these parties for other reasons. Second, it examines the supply side, and more specifically maps how far-right parties utilise nationalism in their programmatic agendas. This analysis shows that the adoption of ‘civic normalisation’ nationalist strategies allow these parties to mobilise broadly beyond their secure voter base. Third, it assesses the extent to which these findings travel outside the European framework by focusing on cases from Latin America as well as the US. The analysis of the ways in which voter dynamics and far-right strategies in these cases may (or may not) mirror those in Europe, underscores the necessity of understanding these phenomena in a broader, interconnected context but also highlights the challenges and implications posed by such broad comparisons.
Daphne Halikiopoulou (PhD LSE) is Chair in Comparative Politics at the University of York. She is interested in party politics and voting behavior with a focus on the far right, populism and nationalism in Europe. She is the author of ‘Understanding right-wing populism and what to do about it’, The Golden Dawn’s ‘Nationalist Solution’: explaining the rise of the far right in Greece and numerous articles on European far right parties. Her research appears in the Journal of European Public Policy, Political Behavior, Perspectives on Politics, the European Journal of Political Research, West European Politics and Environmental Politics among others. Her article ‘Risks, Costs and Labour Markets: Explaining Cross-National Patterns of Far-Right Party Success in European Parliament Elections’ has been awarded Best Paper from the American Political Science Association (APSA). She is a Steering Committee member of the ECPR Extremism & Democracy Standing Group, a member of the PopuList team, joint Editor-in-Chief of the journals Nations and Nationalism and Political Studies, and co-editor of the Springer book series in Electoral Politics.
The lecture will be held in English