PhD thesis by Fred Paxton
What impact have populists made in local governments across Western Europe? And what have the consequences been for the parties themselves?
Despite increasing research into populist parties in power, their impact from within sub-national institutions has been neglected. Taking a novel local perspective, this thesis enquires into the consequences of populist radical right parties in leadership of local government. I compare four Western European cases, in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, and ask three main questions. First, to what extent do they generate policy impact in line with party ideology? Second, to what extent do they undergo a mainstreaming of discourse with the transition from opposition into local government responsibility? And third, by which processes is their impact in policy and mainstreaming in discourse made, and how do these processes vary cross-nationally?
This thesis argues that the degree of radicalism of these parties in local government leadership is shaped according to two principal factors. First, the degree to which power sharing is imposed by the institutional setting. A mayor in a consensual system, like the Swiss case, is constrained to be more moderate compared to a mayor in a majoritarian system, like the Italian case. Second, the involvement of the central party, and the strategic motivation behind their involvement. In particular, the use of local government as part of a mainstreaming strategy is crucial to understand the relative moderation of the French case. Fred Paxton shows how these factors lead to populist radical right parties in the four cases operating through different multi-level governance configurations. Overall, the findings contribute to an understanding of the outcomes of populist radical right party-led local government across Western Europe, and the processes by which their impact is made, and open up a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives for future research.
Fred Paxton is a Research Fellow at the University of Milan, where he is involved in the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded research project ‘ProDem’. Since September 2017, he has been a PhD researcher at the European University Institute. His PhD project deals with the participation of populist radical right parties in local government in Western Europe. His publications have appeared in Government and Opposition and Representation, and are forthcoming in Political Science Research and Methods and Contemporary Italian Politics.