09:30 - 11:10
P11
Room:
Room: South Room 222
Panel Session 11
Klaudia Wegschaider - Contemporary Enfranchisement: A Theory on Party Positioning
Sílvia Claveria - Social Cleavages and the Scope of Public Policy: The Importance of the Rural-Urban Divide
Guido Tiemann - Rethinking the Cleavage of City and Land
Sandra León, Matthias Scantamburlo - Populism and the center-periphery cleavage. The case of the AfD.
Populism and the center-periphery cleavage. The case of the AfD.
P11-4
Presented by: Sandra León, Matthias Scantamburlo
Sandra LeónMatthias Scantamburlo
Carlos III-Juan March Institute. Carlos III University.
The support for populist radical right (PRR) parties has been on the rise over recent decades and has dramatically transformed the political landscape of Western European political systems. Not surprisingly, their emergence and electoral success has motivated a considerable amount of scholarly research. Most of the literature on the PRR, however, focuses on the national and supranational political levels, leaving the subnational level highly unexplored. This paper fills that literature gap by exploring the electoral strategies of PRR parties in substate elections and along the territorial dimension of political competition. To do so, we compare the political discourse of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) across German Länder since its first regional electoral success in 2014 until 2020. Unlike other authors who have focused on single cases or small-n comparisons using more qualitative approaches, we analyse party offer across a greater number of regions using quantitative content analysis through the Regional Party Manifesto coding. Our main argument is that PRR parties adapt to the multi-level structure of the state and make electoral use of centre-periphery issues to find a niche for themselves. Preliminary empirical findings support our main hypothesis, showing evidence of AfD’s party manifesto heterogeneity in the center-periphery dimension across German states.