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Introduction
Today's radical right is said to be 'right-wing' due to its nationalistic, authoritative, anti-cosmopolitan, and especially anti-immigrant views. The economic placement of the radical right is, however, debated. While earlier works point to neo-liberal stances of radical right parties, studies of the social bases of these parties point to significant support from traditionally left-leaning constituencies. Recent scholarship argues that radical right parties abandoned their outlying economic positions and shifted closer toward the economic center (Kitschelt, 2004; De Lange, 2007).
This article, however, questions the utility of assessing radical right party placement on economic issues. It suggests that politics is a larger struggle over the issue content of political competition. Political parties are invested in different issue dimensions, and thus prefer competing on some issues over others. Consequently, parties emphasize their stance on some issue dimensions, while strategically evading positioning on others, in order to mask the distances between themselves and their voters. This article argues that parties, such as the radical right, may successfully adopt a strategy of deliberate position blurring. In light of such competition, taking a position may be neither an appropriate party strategy, nor an adequate academic expectation.
This argument underlines the limits of spatial theory in capturing party competition. While spatial theory conceptualizes political competition as position taking, this article underlines the strategic utility of position avoiding or position blurring. This dimensional approach to political competition considers issue positioning, issue salience, and strategic positional avoidance in a multidimensional context. This approach explains the apparent variance of radical right economic placement as an outcome of these parties' conscious dimensional strategizing - of deliberate position blurring.
This article combines quantitative analyses of electoral manifestos, expert placement of political parties, and voter preferences based on multiple public opinion surveys. It considers 17 radical right parties in nine Western European party systems. I first review the literature on radical right ideological placement. The second section introduces a dimensional approach to party competition, detailing general party strategies in multidimensional contexts, while generating specific hypotheses about the radical right. The third section discusses the data and operationalization. The fourth section presents the analyses and results, while the final section serves as a conclusion.
Where do radical right...