An analysis of the anti-establishment parties in the European Union's member states

Abstract

This study looks at anti-establishment political parties across the Member States of the European Union by taking an extensive approach of ten anti-establishment parties that operate within the Union. This dissertation is motivated by two interconnected research questions: [1] What constitutes an anti-establishment party? [2] How do these anti-establishment parties fit within the left-right dimension of politics? The aim of this study, as vested in the research questions, is to understand the characteristics of anti-establishment parties, which will lead the way to the understanding of an anti-establishment party within the context of an EU member state. The second aim is to show how such parties fit on the traditional left-right dimension of politics. A mixed-method approach in order to assess the above research questions has been taken. The analysis section focuses on the ten political parties. Relying on a research project, by the European University Institute of Florence, called euandi, four dimensions were established. These dimensions are the following [1]-EU Stance, [2] -Migration stance, [3]- Social Issues and [4]- Economy. These dimensions contain three statements each and together with the political parties they were put into one single table. For each statement, the political parties' opinion is ranked on a scale ranging from 1 to 5, where 1 is strongly in favour, 2 is in favour, 3 is neutral, 4 is against and 5 is strongly against. After relying heavily on the euandi database to establish the position of every political party for each dimension, the aggregate score for each party in the respective dimension has been calculated. The results were very interesting, as these scores have shed some light on the answering of the research questions. In the literature review, it is discussed that anti-establishment parties are very different from each other. Furthermore, scholars did not always view anti establishment parties of the left and the right as one single phenomena. This is mainly because anti-establishment have different ideologies, histories and agendas and at times they are on opposing sides of the political spectrum. However, irrespective of their differences and irrelevant of their position on the political spectrum, the underlying factor always remains that anti-establishment have strong similarities that earns them all the above term. The parties' scores from the analysis confirm Amir Abedi's definition on anti political establishment parties. Moreover, they confirm that these parties, even though they do not have fixed ideologies, in many instances they conform to the left- right ideology. This is as with regards to the four dimensions, the parties of the right have acted in accordance with the ideology of the right and the parties of the left have conformed with the ideology of the left.