Abstract
This article puts party strategies at the centre of the analysis of radical right-wing challengers’ fortunes. It extends most previous studies because the shifts of both established and populist parties are envisioned as a complex dynamic system, in which party leaders adaptively learn from feedback and voters continually update their party choices. We argue that agent-based modelling is a fruitful tool to systematically map out the implications of hypotheses on the behaviour of parties, voters and their interactions. Our argument is empirically illustrated by using computer simulations to examine the remarkable rise of the Dutch anti-immigration party PVV. Outcomes reveal that an adaptive strategy leads to large shifts towards the socio-economic left and considerably boost its electoral strength. The more general contribution of this article is that we show how to unravel the mechanisms by which flexible populist parties can find winning positions.
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Notes
We only had to exclude the PvdD because the 2006 Chapel Hill Survey did not include this party. We also left out all other parties that did not gain seats in 2006 (for example, EenNL). One could include these parties, but additional non-policy related parameters would be necessary to account for their marginality, like a bias of voters (Adams, 2001) or a lack of media attention (Muis, 2010).
The party position scores we used correlate strongly with the expert scores collected by Benoit and Laver (2006) (Pearson's r=0.97; n=21). Hereby, we used the three items taxes versus spending, immigration and social. Obviously, Benoit and Laver did not measure the position of PVV, as the party did not yet exist at the time of their expert survey. Therefore, we decided to rely on the Chapel Hill data.
Every run is done with a slightly different sample of citizens: on each dimension, the individual voter's positions are randomly chosen from a normal distribution with each voter's score as mean and standard deviation of 1.
Change heading is done by making a random turn between 90 and 270 degrees.
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Muis, J., Scholte, M. How to find the ‘winning formula’? Conducting simulation experiments to grasp the tactical moves and fortunes of populist radical right parties. Acta Polit 48, 22–46 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.21