Partisan views of Russia: Analyzing European party electoral manifestos since 1991

Abstract

The connection between Russia and European political parties has been in the scholarly and popular spotlight recently. While scholars focus on the connection between the far right (and populist) parties and Russia, they have all but ignored the rapidly increasing literature on the role of political parties in foreign policy. This article provides an attempt to bridge these literatures. After analyzing a corpus of party manifestos, the results suggest that there is temporal variation in how European parties have seen Russia since the end of the Cold War. European parties tended to be mostly positive in their views of Russia prior to 2015. Geography and ideology were much less important as a factor in explaining party positions. While some ideological groups share attitudes across different borders, the overall influence of ideology on attitudes toward Russia is minimal.