The populist radical right in local power : understanding different forms of local government leadership by populist radical right parties in western Europe

Abstract

Despite increasing research into populist parties in power, their impact from within subnational institutions has been neglected. Taking a novel local perspective, this thesis enquires into the consequences of populist radical right parties in leadership of local government. I compare four Western European cases, in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, and ask three main questions. First, to what extent do they generate policy impact in line with party ideology? Second, to what extent do they undergo a mainstreaming of discourse with the transition from opposition into local government responsibility? And third, by which processes is their impact in policy and mainstreaming in discourse made, and how do these processes vary cross-nationally? The thesis argues that the degree of radicalism of these parties in local government leadership is shaped according to two principal factors. First, the degree to which power sharing is imposed by the institutional setting. A mayor in a consensual system, like the Swiss case, is constrained to be more moderate compared to a mayor in a majoritarian system, like the Italian case. Second, the involvement of the central party, and the strategic motivation behind their involvement. In particular, the use of local government as part of a mainstreaming strategy is crucial to understand the relative moderation of the French case. I show how these factors lead to populist radical right parties in the four cases operating through different multi-level governance configurations. Overall, the findings contribute to an understanding of the outcomes of populist radical right party-led local government across Western Europe, and the processes by which their impact is made, and open up a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives for future research.