Earlier research has established a relation between crime and the success of radical right parties, but it remains to be investigated whether crime rates and/or subjective feelings of unsafety explain this association. We demonstrate that violent crime rates (Belgian Federal Police records) are positively related to feelings of unsafety (CSES-Belgium survey data). Radical-right parties also obtain higher scores in municipalities with higher violent crime rates. On the individual level, however, only the subjective feeling of unsafety is significant, not the official crime rates in the municipality of the respondent. While women experience stronger feelings of unsafety, they are less likely to vote for the radical right. By comparing results for the Flemish and the Walloon region in Belgium, we demonstrate that feelings of unsafety are strongly related to the likelihood to cast a radical-right vote. In the absence of such a party, we observe a strong relation with the likelihood to support a more mainstream right-wing party.
The rise of far-right populism across Western democracies has sparked academic and public interest in its spatial dimension. Many seminal theories on the causes of far-right populism identify the rural–urban dimension as a crucial line of conflict in contemporary Western societies. However, we have surprisingly little comparative, cross-country evidence about its overlap with other social grievances. Specifically, this paper asks to what extent descriptive rural–urban differences reflect other social divides due to the unequal distribution of social groups along spatial lines. In an analysis of recent European Social Survey data from 15 Western European countries, I find significant rural–urban differences in twelve of them. A decomposition analysis using the KHB-method reveals that the estimated rural–urban difference is nearly halved once individual socio-demographic characteristics are controlled for. The compositional effects are mainly driven by differences in education, social class and—to a smaller extent—ethnic origin, but not by individual economic hardship, gender and age. I conclude that the rural–urban dimension of far-right populism is indeed evident across Western Europe and it’s also a reflection of the conflict between the ‘new’ high-educated, post-industrial middle class and the ‘old’ manual middle class.
Using the Archive of Interwar Europe Election Data Assemblies (AIEEDA), this article examines electoral size and first-cabinet inclusion among legally competing parties in 25 democracies, 1919–1939, treating anti-system orientation and the released violent-wing code as distinct dimensions of party-system boundaries. Within country-elections, pro-system parties carrying the code had larger vote and seat shares than those without it; the vote-share difference was about 13 percentage points and remained positive with party-family controls and exclusions of disputed codings. After electoral-size controls, both anti-system categories were less likely than the baseline to enter the first cabinet, but direct comparisons did not establish that ideological opposition mattered more than the organizational code. A historical audit of 240 records coded positive in the released data identified 15 that met every contemporaneous audit criterion; many others remained unresolved. The sparse sensitivity yields materially different cabinet estimates but remains a measurement diagnostic because records coded negative were not re-audited. The design estimates conditional associations rather than causal effects because party attributes are not randomly assigned, missingness is structured, and the code is time-invariant and heterogeneous. The article advances a two-dimensional account of party-system access and specifies the evidence needed to measure contemporaneous party-linked coercion.
While Brexit clearly reduces formal policy interactions between the UK and the EU, less clear is what happens to the informal interactions which gradually took shape over almost 50 years of the UK’s EU membership—such as policy transfer, the exchange of policy ideas. This article therefore examines the impact of Brexit on the informal policy transfer mechanisms between the UK and the EU, focusing on the area of homelessness policy. On a theoretical level, the article proposes a new model combining the post-Brexit re-engagement literature with the EU policy transfer literature. Through a programme of interviews in Brussels and Westminster, the analysis finds that a decline in the density of formal exchange networks was partially compensated by renewed intensity in informal exchanges, showing evidence of re-engagement in policy transfer.
In the emerging paradigm of “integration through funding” the budget is increasingly becoming an instrument of EU governance. In this context, cohesion policy is evolving from a funding scheme to a form of strategic spending, leading to the emergence of a new EU budgetary governance, whose key features are the multi-level nature and the conditionality regimes. The paper investigates these emerging trends in EU budgetary governance from a legal perspective, focusing on the centralisation of decision-making, the relationship between levels of government and the Union’s democratic legitimacy. First, building upon theories of multi-level governance, the paper argues that, whereas cohesion policy has traditionally favoured decentralised decision-making, the redirection and repurposing of funding as a form of EU strategic spending tends to recentre decision-making around the relationship between the EU and national executives. Second, the shift towards a more strategic use of spending has enhanced the potential of cohesion funds to serve EU enforcement and compliance purposes, yet it carries two significant accountability and legitimacy concerns: a risk of permanent executive dominance and the stretching of EU enforcement channels beyond the power allocation of the Treaties.
