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Terrorism’s effect on Europe’s centre- and far-right parties

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Abstract

European far-right parties have enjoyed mixed success in the past few years. The primary elements in many of these parties’ policy platforms centre on security, terrorism, and foreign persons. Naturally, these platforms are designed to attract electoral support that these actors can parlay into governing positions. Our study offers an important test to ascertain how voters respond to terrorist attacks with respect to centre- and far-right parties. We contend that far-right parties are to likely benefit from terrorist attacks more than centre-right parties. The results from more than 30 European countries, spanning 1975–2013, affirm our hypothesis. The implications for partisanship, governance, and terrorism are explored in this paper as well.

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Notes

  1. A small number of states included in the study fluctuate between being democratic and non-democratic as defined by the Polity2 measure in the Polity IV database. Thus, while these states are included in the study and are displayed in Table 1, the state-years in which these states fall below the threshold of six on the Polity2 measure are excluded from the statistical analyses.

  2. Some of the referenced approaches use a cut-off of “7.5” rather than “7.9”. Our primary findings were unchanged when using this alternative threshold.

  3. The GTD is arguably the most comprehensive dataset on terrorist activity and has codified over 104,000 cases of terrorism (Institute for Economic and Peace: Global Terrorism Index Report 2012, p.6).

  4. We included a measure for the number of injuries stemming from terrorist attacks in separate analyses, but this measure fell short of statistical significance in all models.

  5. We have tested our hypotheses with fixed-effects as well, and the results are quite similar though the vote share models reveal less robust findings than the seat share results. These results are available upon request.

  6. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Government, Global Studies, and Geography, Shepherd University, 301 N King St., Shepherdstown, NW, 25443, USA

    William Wheatley

  2. Department of Political Science, Valdosta State University, 1500 N. Patterson, 2306D West Hall, Valdosta, GA, 31698, USA

    Joseph Robbins

  3. Department of Social Sciences, Augusta University, 2500 Walton Way, Augusta, GA, 30904, USA

    Lance Y. Hunter & Martha Humphries Ginn

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  1. William Wheatley
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  2. Joseph Robbins
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Correspondence to Joseph Robbins.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 8, 9, 10 and 11.

Table 8 Regression of terrorism’s casualties on rightist party seat shares, with additional controls (with panel-corrected standard errors)
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Table 9 Regression of terrorist incidents on rightist party vote shares, with additional controls (with panel-corrected standard errors)
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Table 10 Regression of terrorist casualties on rightist party seat shares, with additional controls (with panel-corrected standard errors)
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Table 11 Regression of terrorist incidents on rightist party vote shares, with additional controls (with panel-corrected standard errors)
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Wheatley, W., Robbins, J., Hunter, L.Y. et al. Terrorism’s effect on Europe’s centre- and far-right parties. Eur Polit Sci 19, 100–121 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41304-019-00210-8

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