Mainstream party agenda-responsiveness and the electoral success of right-wing populist parties in Europe

Abstract

Scholars link the electoral success of right-wing populist parties to a programmatic crisis of representation for mainstream parties, which arguably do not put their voters’ most important issues on the agenda. We have little knowledge about whether these two assumptions hold: To what extent is there a low agenda-responsiveness of mainstream parties, and in how far is their agenda-responsiveness related to the electoral success of right-wing populist parties in Europe? We conceptualize the programmatic crisis of representation as a lack of mainstream party agenda-responsiveness due to dwindling linkage, changing lines of political conflict, and the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. We develop a novel measure of issue-based agenda-responsiveness comparing voters’ most important problems with salient issues in party manifestos. For 109 elections in 26 member states of the European Union (EU) from 2004 to 2019, we find no lack of issue-based agenda-responsiveness between mainstream parties and average citizens, but a lower degree of responsiveness towards the so-called ‘losers of globalization’, especially compared to ‘winners of globalization’. This lower responsiveness, however, is not systematically related to the electoral success of right-wing populist parties whose mobilization contexts are arguably more complex.