We argue that a full account of the determinants of nationalist voting must take into account
this breadth in nationalist political parties and the diversity of country settings; we employ two-
rounds of pooled regression analysis for more than 160 political parties in 89 national election cycles
in 33 countries across Eastern and Western Europe (see Appendix 1 for full list of cases). Our
preliminary findings indicate economic, institutional, social and historical variables have a significant
effect across Europe, but in different ways. Our findings suggest that nationalist political parties in
Eastern and Western Europe do well under different conditions, and that the dynamics of
nationalist electoral support are, in some aspects, geographically bounded.
The remainder of this paper proceeds as follows: first, we describe more fully the range of
electoral results that are of interest to us and illustrate the variation for which we hope to account.
Second, we present a brief review of the literature on nationalist voting and the variables and
hypotheses that derive from this body of work. Third, we discuss how and why nationalist political
parties might function in significantly different ways in Eastern and Western European countries,
and how we expect these differences to influence our hypotheses. Fourth, we address basic
methodological issues before moving on to a presentation of our empirical results. We conclude
with some consideration of the implications of this analysis as well as avenues for future research.
T
T
R
R
E
E
N
N
D
D
S
S
I
I
N
N
N
N
A
A
T
T
I
I
O
O
N
N
A
A
L
L
I
I
S
S
T
T
V
V
O
O
T
T
I
I
N
N
G
G
To understand nationalist voting patterns, we use vote share as a percent of total votes cast
as our dependent variable. To compute this value, we identified all nationalist political parties who
fielded candidates in a given national parliamentary election, documented the percent of total votes
they received, and summed up the total nationalist votes per country per election. In all cases, we
used the data for elections to the lower house of representatives in bicameral legislative systems.
Sources for of data are drawn from using electoral results reported by countries’ interior ministries,
electoral commissions, and other official representatives; this data was then collected by various
electoral monitoring organizations, institutes, and electoral groups. Appendix 4 provides a list of
our primary coding sources.
We include all political parties that not only used nationalist rhetoric or advocated nationalist
policies, but also those whose core identity as a political party is built around advocacy of such
ideas.
1
We do not include political parties that occasionally make appeals to patriotism or invoke nationalism to generate
support for a particular policy; almost all political parties, regardless of ideology or affiliation make periodic claims of
3
Convention