that pro-fascist legacies continue to play a role in support for national and right-wing parties across
Europe.
The interactive model sheds light on many of the common and different determinants for
support for right-wing and nationalist parties across Eastern and Western Europe. Most
prominently, economic dynamics function in diverse ways across the East and West. The economic
determinants in the East are driven by unemployment while in the West increased national growth
and unequal distribution of wealth contribute to support for nationalist and right-wing groups. To
further test the differences across Europe, Table 5 reports a test for equality of coefficients in
Western and Eastern Europe. This table demonstrates whether or not the observed differences
across the regions are statistically significant. The results of the test of equality indicate that two
variables do indeed differ significantly across the West and East, the level of economic inequality
and the degree of homogeneity. Thus, when comparing Eastern to Western Europe we can
confidently reject the null hypotheses that economic and social indicators function in similar ways
across the regions. As for the other variables of importance, including institutional and historical
determinants, we can conclude that they work in similar ways across greater Europe. To sum up,
the findings suggest that there are both common and divergent determinants for nationalist party
support across Europe.
P
REDICTED CASES
Before our concluding the discussion of our empirical results, it is worthwhile to highlight a
few cases that our model accurately predicts. Table 6 compares the actual vote share of right-wing
and nationalist parties in Eastern and Western Europe along with our predicted value. In particular,
the 1992 elections in Estonia best illustrate the predicative power of our model. The estimate values
for vote share are within 0.04 of the actual vote share for right-wing and nationalist parties.
In spite of these encouraging cases that fit our model well, a few cases were significant
There are a few possibilities for Ireland’s exceptionalism. In terms of economic performance,
Ireland leads much of Western Europe in the 1990s in economic growth; Ireland was the fastest
growing economy in Europe (World Bank 2003). A second possibility is that the Irish electoral
system is unique in Western Europe. Parties cluster in distinct ways and do not conform to the
9
It is worthwhile to mention that the base and interactive models were run excluding cases that were statistically
significant outliers. Re-running the models excluding outliers, however, did not meaningfully change the implication of
our key variables.
18
Convention