Are cross-national surveys the best way to study the extreme-right vote in Europe?

Patterns of Prejudice

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 177-196

  Hooghe, Marc ^a   Reeskens, Tim ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEUVEN   (Belgium)

Author keywords

Cross cultural validity; European social survey; Extreme right parties; Survey research; Voting behaviour

Indexed keywords

EID: 34047142335     PISSN: 0031322X     EISSN: 14617331     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00313220701265544     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. For a review of the literature, see Pippa Norris, Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005).
2. Alistair Cole, 'A strange affair: the 2002 presidential and parliamentary elections in France', Government and Opposition, vol. 37, no. 3, July 2002, 317-42.
3. Herbert Kitschelt with Anthony J. McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1995).
4. Pia Knigge, 'The ecological correlates of right-wing extremism in Western Europe', European Journal of Political Research, vol. 34, no. 2, October 1998, 249-79.
5. For a review of this debate, see, for example, Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe;
6. Norris, Radical Right;
7. Wouter van der Brug, Meindert Fennema and Jean Tillie, 'Anti-immigrant parties in Europe: ideological or protest vote?', European Journal of Political Research, vol. 37, no. 1, January 2000, 77-102;
8. Wouter van der Brug, Meindert Fennema and Jean Tillie, 'Why some anti-immigrant parties fail and others succeed', Comparative Political Studies, vol. 38, no. 5, June 2005, 537-73;
9. and John Veugelers and André Magnan, 'Conditions of far-right strength in contemporary Western Europe: an application of Kitschelt's theory', European Journal of Political Research, vol. 44, no. 6, October 2005, 837-60.
10. Janet Harkness, Fons van de Vijver and Peter Mohler (eds), Cross-Cultural Survey Methods (New York: Wiley-Interscience 2002).
11. See, for example, Lieven Pauwels and Stefaan Pleysier, 'Assessing cross-cultural validity of fear of crime measures through comparisons between linguistic communities in Belgium', European Journal of Criminology, vol. 2, no. 2, April 2005, 139-59.
12. Jaak Billiet, 'Cross-cultural equivalence with structural equation modeling', in Harkness, van de Vijver and Mohler (eds), Cross-Cultural Survey Methods, 247-76.
13. Examples include Knigge, 'The ecological correlates of right-wing extremism in Western Europe'; van der Brug, Fennema and Tillie, 'Anti-immigrant parties in Europe'; Wouter van der Brug and Meindert Fennema, 'Protest or mainstream? How the European anti-immigrant parties developed into two separate groups by 1999', European Journal of Political Research, vol. 42, no. 1, January 2003, 55-76;
14. Matt Golder, 'Explaining variation in the success of extreme right parties in Western Europe', Comparative Political Studies, vol. 36, no. 4, May 2003, 432-66;
15. van der Brug, Fennema and Tillie, 'Why some anti-immigrant parties fail and others succeed'; Norris, Radical Right;
16. Marcel Lubbers and Peer Scheepers, 'Individual and contextual characteristics of the German extreme right-wing vote in the 1990s: a test of complementary theories', European Journal of Political Research, vol. 38, no. 1, August 2000,63-94;
17. Marcel Lubbers, Jaak Billiet and Peer Scheepers, 'Multilevel modelling of Vlaams Blok voting: individual and contextual characteristics of the Vlaams Blok', Acta Politica, vol. 35, no. 4, 2000, 363-98.
18. Marcel Lubbers, Mérove Gijsberts and Peer Scheepers, 'Extreme right voting in Western Europe', European Journal of Political Research, vol. 41, no. 3, May 2002, 345-78 (357).
19. Ibid., 374n5.
20. It should be noted that Lubbers, Gijsberts and Scheepers use various data sources to perform their analysis ('Extreme right voting in Western Europe', 354). Using survey data from various institutes and sources with differing data collection routines, however, is usually a risky business. Therefore, we decided to limit this test to one high-quality data source, namely the European Social Survey. We used both the 2002 and the 2004 rounds of the ESS. These data can be obtained from Norwegian Social Science Data Services (NSD), European Social Survey Data (Bergen: NSD 2003); they are available online at http://ess.nsd.uib.no (viewed 9 January 2007).
21. Roger Jowell and the Central Co-ordinating Team, European Social Survey 2002/2003: Technical Report (London: Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University 2003).
22. It should be noted here that the name of the party was being requested, not whether the respondent had voted for an 'extreme-right party'. This implies that a conceptual bias, which might be another cause of inequivalence, is not a problem here.
23. The latter are taken from the Electionworld database, available on the Wikipedia website at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Electionworld/ Electionworld (viewed 9 January 2007).
24. Because some of our independent variables are related to party characteristics, the parties themselves function as units of measurements, and not the combined percentage of extreme-right votes in a country. For example, in Italy the dynamics of under-representation might be totally different for the AN than for the MSFT. We also investigated whether it was possible to use other survey sources to boost the number of observations. While this is theoretically possible, it would add the complications involved in comparing surveys (timing, procedures, ways of reporting responses, wording of questions etc.), which would actually make it more difficult to test the occurrence of response and measurement bias in a strict and reliable manner.
25. For the extremely small parties (those receiving less than 2 per cent) it could be argued that it makes little sense to try to capture their electorate in a general population survey. The pattern of under-representation, however, remains exactly the same if we limit ourselves to the larger extreme-right parties, i.e. those receiving more than 2 per cent of the vote. In separate analyses (available from the authors) we also used the square values or the log values of the party results, but this did not lead to substantially different results.
26. 2 = 111.352; df = 28; p < 0.0001.
27. Robert M. Groves, Don A. Dillman, John L. Eltinge and Roderick J. A. Little (eds), Survey Nonresponse (New York: John Wiley 2001);
28. Floyd J. Fowler, Jr, Survey Research Methods, 3rd edn (Thousand Oaks, CA, London and New Delhi: Sage 2001), 39-57.
29. Jeffrey A. Karp and David Brockington, 'Social desirability and response validity: a comparative analysis of overreporting voter turnout in five countries', Journal of Politics, vol. 67, no. 3, August 2005, 825-40;
30. Robert F. Belli, Michael W. Traugott, Margaret Young and Katherine A. McGonagle, 'Reducing vote overreporting in surveys: social desirability, memory failure, and source monitoring', Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1, Spring 1999, 90-108.
31. Marc Hooghe and Koen Pelleriaux, 'Compulsory voting in Belgium: an application of the Lijphart thesis', Electoral Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, December 1998, 419-24.
32. Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys (Thousand Oaks, CA and London: Sage 1996).
33. van der Brug and Fennema, 'Protest or mainstream?'; Mogens Pedersen, 'Towards a new typology of party lifespans and minor parties', Scandinavian Political Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1982, 1-16.
34. Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe;
35. Norris, Radical Right.
36. Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe, 90.
37. Golder, 'Explaining variation in the success of extreme right parties in Western Europe', 448.
38. van der Brug and Fennema, 'Protest or mainstream?'
39. To avoid the problem of the limited number of cases, we also conducted a multilevel analysis, using simultaneously information about individual respondents and country-level characteristics as independent variables (not reported here for lack of space, available from the authors). This multilevel model also confirms the notion that both response and measurement bias are clearly present.