Why Are There No Left-Authoritarian Parties in Rich Democracies?

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Spatial theories of democratic party competition predict that political entrepreneurs in multi-party systems will field electorally successful parties appealing to voters whose salient issue preferences are not being serviced by an existing party. There is, however, an anomaly spotted by most studies of two- or three-dimensional party competition in the politics of established Western affluent democracies: There are plenty of voters who indicate “left-wing” economic preferences combined with “conservative” or “authoritarian” propensities on political governance (law and order, restriction of civil liberties, traditional kinship roles) and parochial conceptions of citizenship (nativism, nationalism, anti-immigration). But following standard sources to locate party positions, there are no electorally relevant parties squarely located in the left-authoritarian field of political programs.
The papers of this panel speak to this puzzle. Why has there not been party entry, despite the presence of a very substantial share of citizens with “left-authoritarian” programmatic preferences? Are we dealing with a situation of blatant non-representation, or even mis-representation of citizens by democratic politics in Western democracies? And how would one account for this anomaly? The papers in this panel will address this question from different perspectives.

Sub Unit

• Division 34: Representation and Electoral Systems

Individual Presentations

• Do Citizens Perceive an Empty Left-Authoritarian Quadrant? - Ruth Dassonneville, Universite de Montreal; Patrick Fournier, Universite de Montreal; Zeynep Somer-Topcu, University of Texas at Austin

• Sahra Wagenknecht, the Left and a Left-Authoritarian Party for Germany - Sarah Wagner, Queen's University Belfast; L. Constantin Wurthmann, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

• Why No Left-Authoritarian Parties? - Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University; Philipp Rehm, Johns Hopkins University

• Sequencing Left-Authoritarian Trends in Radical Right Parties and Their Support - Matthias Enggist, University of Lausanne; Alexander Horn, University of Konstanz

Chair

• Robin E. Best Binghamton University (SUNY)

Discussants

• Robin E. Best Binghamton University (SUNY)

• Charlotte Cavaille For School of Public Policy