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This paper investigates the conditions under which nationalist political parties in Eastern and
Western Europe are able to attract meaningful electoral support in national elections. We focus on a
collection of economic, social, institutional, and historical variables drawn from existing research on
nationalist parties to understand how these factors, alone and in combination, affect these parties’
propensity to win votes. In so doing, we explicitly look at explanations at the macro-social and
economic level rather than individual voter choice; the reasons why particular individuals support
for one party over another have generated a substantial body of research in its own right (see,
among others, Whiteley 1979; Husbands 1984; Duch and Gibson 1992; Lubbers and Scheepers
2002; Zoco and Messina 2002). Our aim, however, is to explore the objective political, social, and
economic conditions that can inform voters’ subjective appraisals of these parties’ claims and
promises and thus, drive overall electoral results. As a second order concern, we are interested in
understanding if and how the dynamics of nationalist political support differ substantively as we
move geographically from Western to Eastern Europe. Here, we explore whether the same kinds of
variables matter for nationalist parties in the West and the East and, if so, whether these variables
play the same kind of role or have the same degree of importance for countries with quite dissimilar
economic conditions, political legacies, social experiences, and historical memories.
Understanding why and how certain nationalist parties do well at the polls seems particularly
urgent at present, given a flurry of well-publicized electoral victories by right-wing nationalist parties
spanning Europe. In April 2002, the results of the first round of voting in the French presidential
election stunned political observers the world over as Jean Marie Le Pen, the charismatic and
controversial leader of the far-right National Front Party, received 16.86% of the vote—enough to
earn himself a place on the second-round ballot and keep the socialist candidate, Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin, out of the running. Despite Le Pen’s sound defeat in the second ballot two weeks
later, his high profile victory in the first round touched off a wave of speculation and analysis about
the re-emergence of radical right nationalist politics across Europe (see, for example, Bell and
Criddle 2002; Eatwell 2002). Le Pen’s success was not easy to dismiss as an anomaly, as it followed
on the heels of a string of highly publicized electoral gains by right-wing nationalist parties in
Austria, Italy, Russia and Slovakia while in Belgium, Estonia, the Netherlands, Denmark and a host
of other countries, right-wing parties using nationalist rhetoric and advocating exclusionary policies
posted surprisingly strong results in national elections (Caramani 2000; see Ramet 1999).
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