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Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of…
Direct and Indirect Welfare Chauvinism as Party Strategies: An Analysis of the Danish People's Party
The populist right-wing (hereafter PRW) is arguably the most successful
new party family in Western Europe
The policy focus of PRW parties is no longer restricted to niche issues, such as immigration. Socioeconomic issues, and particularly the politics of welfare state reform, are important battlegrounds for these parties in contemporary Europe.
From around one-tent of the votes in the early 1990s, the average seat-share of these parties in the parliaments of Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway had jumped to 17 percent in 2013
The preferences of PRW parties regarding redistribution combine a strong pro-welfare state position with explicit exclusion of non-matives.
This particular combination, which enables PRW parties to occupy a traditional social-democratic or left-wing ideological space on the socioeconomic dimension while maintaining their anti-immigration right-wing position on the sociocultural dimension is conceptualized as welfare chauvinism
The impact of party politics on welfare policies is well-proven Given that the recent electoral achievements of PRW parties have strengthened their bargaining power in the policy-making process, it is likely that the presence of a powerful PRW party in this process leads to alterations of social policies in a welfare chauvinistic direction.
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Political parties can pursue different strategies in order to shape public policy outcomes. Thus, to understand whether PRW parties are successful in transferring their welfare chauvinistic preferences into policies' we need to clarify which strategies they may use.
Method and Data
Our hypotheses are examined empirically in a study of one of the most successful PRW parties in Europe – the Danish People’s Party (DPP hereafter) – and legislation that is very susceptible to welfare chauvinistic arguments. In other words, the DPP and Denmark provide us with a case in
which we have very good conditions for observing the strategy of a PRW
party when it tries to transpose welfare chauvinistic preferences into
policies.
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Conclusion
The questions of whether and how PRW parties translate welfare chauvin istic preferences into policy measures are theoretically and empirically rel evant not only because welfare state development remains sensitive to
ideological preferences of parties in power, but especially because these parties recently abandoned their fringe position and, through significant electoral gains, moved closer to the core of the political systems in
Europe.