Nationalist Parties Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Nationalist parties are those political parties whose chief basis of appeal and whose raison d’être is to promote the interests of and emotional attachment to a nation. A nation refers to an aggregate of people who have a sense of common identity and some shared values or cultural distinctiveness, as opposed to a state, which organizes the institutions for selecting decision makers and making decisions regarding public policy. Conceived in this way, nation is a cultural concept, while state is a political one. The boundaries of a nation may or may not be congruent with the borders of a state; instead, the nation may exist as a subculture within a state.

Nationalist parties may promote the power and interests of a sovereign state, or they may promote the autonomy of subculture. Either type is concerned with the promotion of a distinct identity, a psychological attachment to a nation. Both types are considered in this essay to be nationalist parties that promote identity, rather than traditional mainstream parties, which have largely promoted class-based or religious issues. Both types of nationalist parties have increased their bases of support or vote share in the recent past, especially in countries where the opportunity structure facilitates the emergence of new parties.

Rise And Decline Of Parties Of Class And Religion

Some four decades ago, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) argued that the cleavage structure of western democracies was based on class and religious issues, and hence the party systems of these democracies represented those cleavages. Party “families” dominated the political arena of most Western democracies: Christian Democracy or similar parties of the center right, labor-based or social democracy parties, and parties of classic liberalism. Typically, the first two families won the vast majority of the legislative seats in countries like Austria, Canada, Germany, and Great Britain. While the dominance of two parties was not as pronounced in countries with more fragmented party systems, in general significantly fewer parties garnered a significant share of legislative seats than in countries where two parties did not dominate.

In recent decades, however, these “major” parties have been losing vote and seat share throughout the industrialized West, and new parties have been emerging in the lacunae left by the weakening of the “major” parties. The extent of the success of the emerging parties in any given country is in part a function of what has been called “the opportunity structure.” This recent trend toward the success of nationalist parties is a function of cultural change as documented in the seminal work of Ronald Ingle hart, among others (Ingle hart 1977, 1990). This body of research postulates the declining salience of issues regarding class and the status of religion. Class-based issues have declined in salience as a function of the unprecedented period of postwar prosperity. Issues regarding wages, hours worked, and working conditions have become less of a concern to working-class individuals than social issues such as the protection of conventional morality. Religious issues have declined in salience as part of the general trend toward secularization of the Western world. Because Catholics in Europe can no longer be counted on to vote their religion, for example, overtly Catholic parties in the Netherlands and Italy dropped or played down that basis of their self-definition in the early 1990s.

Populist Movement Toward Nationalist Parties

As the parties promoting identity with either the sovereign nation or the subculture emerged to claim the vote share lost by the traditional parties of class and religion, the political arena of Western countries was transformed. Class-based issues were to a large extent displaced by lifestyle issues such as environmentalism, feminism, national pride, and middle class morality. (Economic issues have regained some salience in the face of the 2008–2009 recession.) As certain segments of the population were marginalized by modernization, these people protected their self-esteem by identifying with a sense of belonging to the backbone of a community or nation. Thus, peasants, shopkeepers, clerks, owners of small family farms, and unskilled labor whose socioeconomic roles were marginalized could take comfort and self-esteem from an identification with the folk that defined their nation. Such people tend to be less tolerant of those who are not accepted as part of the folk. The inhabitants of what is now Germany had a strong element of volkism running through their political philosophy; this took the place of the state that did not exist to provide an outlet for the sense of belonging to a German nation for almost two millennia. The absence of a political outlet for the sense of a German nation resulted in an exaggerated glorification of the idea of the German nation-state in the writings of such German intellectuals as Georg Hegel.

This exaggerated pride in one’s nation in many countries was expressed in a movement of the less-educated and marginalized segments of the country. Such movements are generally known as populism. While parties expressing strong nationalist feelings are frequently identified as the extreme right (Ignazi, 2002), the radical right (Kitschelt, 1995), or the far right (Karapin, 2002), they do not place well on the traditional left-to-right party ideology dimension. The attributes that have been shown to characterize the populist right (i.e., rejection of out-groups and distrust of elites) are distinct from those that characterize the traditional mainstream right, such as protection of property, maintenance of public order, and promotion of religiosity. Hence, it may be more accurate to describe these emerging nationalist parties, some of which promote policies that would seem to be on the left, as populist parties. These nationalist and populist parties, as a product of the trend toward postindustrial societies, may now be a permanent part of the political landscape.

Bibliography:

Arwine, Alan, and Lawrence Mayer. “The Changing Bases of Political Conflict in Western Europe: The Cases of Belgium and Austria.” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 14, no. 2 (July 2008): 428–452.
Ignazi, Piero. “The Extreme Right: Defining the Object and Assessing the Causes.” In Shadows over Europe:The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe, by Martin Schain, Arstide Zolberg, and Patrick Hossay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Inglehart, Ronald. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
Modernization and Postmodernization: Cultural, Economic and Political Change in 43 Societies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Karapin, Roger. “Far Right Parties and the Construction of Immigration Issues in Germany.” In Shadows over Europe: The Development and Impact of the Extreme Right in Western Europe, by Martin Schain, Arstide Zolberg, and Patrick Hossay. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Kitschelt, Herbert. The Radical Right in Western Europe. Ann Arbor:The University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Lipset, Seymour, and Stein Rokkan. Party Systems and Voter Alignments. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

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