Radical Right Parties

The given text, titled “Where do radical right parties stand? Position blurring in multidimensional competition”, by Jan Rovny, deals with questioning the usefulness of that research which is trying to gauge how parties presumed to be far right-wing tend to align themselves along economic policy. The article questions whether a spatial approach can be adopted to assess the stance of radical right parties. The author states that this spatial approach to analyzing voter behavior assumes that voters would support that party which tends to match closest to their own ideology. The underlying assumption in this is that political competition causes the parties to shift position with respect to their voters. However, the dimensional approach illustrates

Using data collected from various sources, including manifesto data, surveys of voter’s preferences, as well as data from party experts, regarding the party’s placements, Rovny attempts to test his hypotheses. He also uses 17 Western European radical right parties. He shows how these parties seek to gain from a deliberate “position blurring” (which would otherwise be a costly choice for major, mainstream parties to make), and how their highlighting of secondary issues such as immigration and promoting their idea of ethnically-united and homogenous nations, etc, tends to benefit these fringe parties. He concludes with a look of the facts proved by testing his hypotheses, and asserts that “position taking” is misleading; as such parties actually work on position blurring and avoidance of certain issues, to attract

The article takes into consideration all of those Western European parties generally referred to as radical right, populist right, extreme right or neo-fascist by the varied party literature. Here, the main critique is the question of objectivity and the application of one’s judgment in evaluating a theory. Again, the question of reality in the sphere of information available to the researcher is also important, as these literatures oriented classifications are always subject to change.

The Role of Outliers: Apart from this, the study did not make any mention of any “outlier” variables. The outliers that throw up in data analysis are sometimes important tools for giving a complete picture or different side of the story. Were we to learn more about the normalcy of the position blurring phenomenon practiced by radical right political parties, then it is by considering, and analyzing the “abnormal”, and thus we could identify any possible outliers and treat this as a separate critical