Riding the Populist Wave

Europe's Mainstream Right in Crisis

Tim Bale, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781316518762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009007924
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In spite of the fact that Conservative, Christian democratic and Liberal parties continue to play a crucial role in the democratic politics and governance of every Western European country, they are rarely paid the attention they deserve. This cutting-edge comparative collection, combining qualitative case studies with large-N quantitative analysis, reveals a mainstream right squeezed by the need to adapt to both 'the silent revolution' that has seen the spread of postmaterialist, liberal and cosmopolitan values and the backlash against those values – the 'silent counter-revolution' that has brought with it the rise of a myriad far right parties offering populist and nativist answers to many of the continent's thorniest political problems. What explains why some mainstream right parties seem to be coping with that challenge better than others? And does the temptation to ride the populist wave rather than resist it ultimately pose a danger to liberal democracy?

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• 1 The Mainstream Right in Western Europe: Caught between the Silent Revolution and Silent Counter-Revolution
• 2 The Demand Side: Profiling the Electorate of the Mainstream Right in Western Europe since the 2000s
• 3 The Supply Side: Mainstream Right Party Policy Positions in a Changing Political Space in Western Europe
• 4 Austria: Tracing the Christian Democrats’ Adaptation to the Silent Counter-Revolution
• 5 France: Party System Change and the Demise of the Post-Gaullist Right
• 6 Germany: How the Christian Democrats Manage to Adapt to the Silent Counter-Revolution
• 7 Italy: The Mainstream Right and its Allies, 1994–2018
• 8 The Netherlands: How the Mainstream Right Normalized the Silent Counter-Revolution
• 9 Spain: The Development and Decline of the Popular Party
• 10 Sweden: The Difficult Adaptation of the Moderates to the Silent Counter-Revolution
• 11 The United Kingdom: The Conservatives and their Competitors in the post-Thatcher Era
• 12 The Mainstream Right in Western Europe in the Twenty-First Century
• References
• Index