But for all the attention given to these parties, the phenomenon of nationalist political
activity in Europe is actually much broader and deeper than most observers have explicitly
acknowledged; despite the wealth of research on the determinants of nationalist voting (among
others, Lancaster 1989; Zirakzadeh 1989; Kitschelt 1995; Jackman and Volpert 1996; Carter 2002;
Golder 2003;), few have explicitly grappled with the full range of nationalist political parties in time
and in space. To start, much of the focus on nationalist politics in Europe has been devoted to
parties and politicians who are emphatically on the far right of the ideological spectrum, yet there are
dozens of political parties that are organized to promote a particular nation’s well-being, or
safeguard the interests of a minority population but which eschew right-wing rhetoric and policies.
Some, like the Scottish Nationalist Party in Great Britain, or the Volksunie in Belgium have
progressive ideologies, yet represent highly specific national communities; Sinn Fein, present in both
Britain and Ireland, is situated on the extreme left of the ideological spectrum, yet is undoubtedly
nationalistic in its policies and rhetoric (Jacobs 1989; Day 2000). As a corrective to this narrow
focus on parties of a particular ideological bent, we attempt to find patterns in electoral support for
a broad range of nationalist political parties; in part, we are interested in discerning whether a clear
pattern does exist across a group of parties that might share little in common apart from a common
nationalist appeal.
Second, much of the existing work on nationalist voting and macro-level social, economic,
and institutional conditions has developed and tested theories in a limited laboratory of countries
and cases—often in only one country and occasionally within a single election cycle (see, for
example, Whiteley 1979; Bailer-Galanda and Neugebauer 1996; Kreidl and Vlachová 1999; Mudde
and Van Holsteyn 2000) Surprisingly, although nationalist parties receive a great deal of attention in
both Western Europe and in Eastern Europe, and a considerable amount of research exists on
parties in many individual countries, the two halves of the continent remain isolated in comparative
studies of voting trends. Somewhat surprisingly, few studies exist that explicitly assess nationalist
mobilization, party politics, or voter support across the east-west divide. Yet, given that nationalist
parties are a pan-European phenomena, it seems to us worthwhile to investigate nationalist voting
trends using both Eastern and Western European countries and parties. Therefore, investigate
whether the established variables in the literature that play a dominant role in a limited set of cases
can travel across time and space to other elections in other European contexts. We are interested in
testing not only if these variables are important in both East and West, but also whether they play
similar roles in both places.
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Convention