Title: Spain: No Country for the Populist Radical Right?
Abstract: AbstractAlthough there is growing research interest in populist radical right (PRR) parties in Western Europe, little attention has been paid to the case of Spain – a country where these parties are almost non-existent or irrelevant from an electoral and political point of view. In a nutshell, we maintain that in contemporary Spain there is real demand for PRR parties, but three supply-side factors are impeding their electoral breakthrough and persistence: the cleavage structure of the country, the strategy of competition of the mainstream right and the electoral system. At the same time, we postulate that at least in the case of Spain the Great Recession has not improved the electoral odds of the PRR as such but rather facilitated the emergence of leftist populist forces.Keywords:: Radical RightPopulismSpainCleavage StructureAnti-immigrationSouthern Europe AcknowledgementsPrevious versions of this article were presented at the World Conference of the International Political Association (IPSA) held in Madrid, 8–12 July 2012, and at the Research in Progress Seminar of the Sussex European Institute, 6 February 2013. For their valuable comments on earlier drafts, we are indebted to Tim Bale, Cas Mudde, Paul Taggart, the two anonymous reviewers and the editors of South European Society and Politics. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser wants to acknowledge that the research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework programme (FP7/20072013) under grant agreement PIEF-GA-2010273525 and the Chilean National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FONDECYT project 1140101).Additional informationNotes on contributorsSonia AlonsoSonia Alonso is an Assistant Professor of Government at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Qatar. During the research for this article, she was a Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin. Her most recent book is Challenging the State: Devolution and the Battle for Partisan Credibility (Oxford University Press, 2012).Cristóbal Rovira KaltwasserCristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is an Associate Professor at the School of Political Science at Diego Portales University in Santiago de Chile. His work has appeared in journals such as Democratization, Government & Opposition and Political Studies among others and his research focuses on populism in a comparative perspective.