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CU Boulder political scientist Jeffrey Nonnemacher asserts that Western European national political parties use their affiliations with party families to signal their own political viewpoints

In the 2013 German national elections, the upstart political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) failed to gain a single seat in parliament. Just four years later, the AfD won 97 seats and became the third-largest political party in Germany.

The AfD made its historic inroads in the 2017 German elections at the same time it transformed itself from a�� but relatively moderate party into a political movement that became much more closely aligned with radical right parties in the rest of Western Europe, says��Jeffrey Nonnemacher, an assistant teaching professor with the 91��Ƭ������AV��International Affairs Program, whose research focus is political parties and elections.

In particular, Nonnemacher points to a decision by AfD’s party leader, Frauke Petry, in 2017 to host radical right leaders from across Europe, including Marine Le Pen with the French National Rally, Geert Wilders of the Dutch Party for Freedom and Matteo Salvini of Italy’s Northern League. That decision effectively telegraphed to voters the party’s shift to the right and signaled its embrace of the transnational radical right party label, says Nonnemacher, who recently published a paper in the�� about voter perceptions of transnational politics.

CU Boulder scholar Jeffrey Nonnemacher is an assistant teaching professor in the International Affairs Program and the Arts and Sciences Honors Program and a lecturer in the Department of Political Science.

“My goal with this paper is to tackle the question of: Do voters care if the AfD’s leadership is spending a lot of time with France’s Marine Le Pen and the National Rally? Are voters getting some sort of information from the party family label attached to a party and the party’s relationship with that label?” he explains. In his paper, Nonnemacher contends that political parties in Western Europe are responsive to politics outside their home country—and that strategic choices to embrace a larger party family label, such as radical right in the case of AfD, do influence how parties are perceived by a country’s voters.

In a recent conversation with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Nonnemacher emphasized that a political party that embraces the party family signifies its commitment to the larger ideological goals associated with the party family, while parties that push back and work to distance themselves from their sister parties from other countries signal that they may not be credible champions for core issues. His answers have been lightly edited for style and clarity.

Question: Can you define what constitutes a transnational party family?

���DzԲԱ𳾲�������:��In political science—especially in comparative politics—one of the goals is to think about the ways we can compare political outcomes. One of the ways we do this is by looking at these so-called party families. These are basically categorizations of parties based upon shared histories, shared ideology and common networks of activists and leaders.

There are a whole host of party families. The largest families in Europe are the Social Democrats, which is your center-left, working-class parties, and the Conservatives, which are your traditional center-right parties. You’ve also got your Green parties, which are your environmental parties, among many other families.

These party families are now much more useful than what academics created them for, which was tools for comparisons. Today, parties within similar party families tend to behave the same, learn from each other and form groups that transcend national boundaries based upon shared ideologies.

Question: What motivated you to explore the topic of transnational parties as a source of voter perceptions?

���DzԲԱ𳾲�������:��The academic answer is that I felt there was a gap there. We know a lot about how voters in Europe today are concerned about integration and thinking about politics beyond their own borders. But we had not yet, as academics, come to terms with the consequences of this, for��how they view their parties and the links between what information they’re getting and their political parties. That was the academic motivation.

The more topical answer was the rise of the radical right parties in these various countries and how these parties seemed to be learning from each other, copying each other and celebrating each other’s victories in a way that we hadn’t really seen before. You have Hungary’s Victor Orbán hosting CPAC (the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Conference), and you have Marine Le Pen in France having these big rallies with other radical right leaders.

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Hungary’s Victor Orbán hosts CPAC (the U.S.-based Conservative Political Action Conference). (Photo: Elkes Andor/Wikimedia Commons)

My motivation was trying to understand the consequences of this seeminginternationalization of right party politics especially, but also party politics more generally.

Question: What are some specific reasons why parties might choose to embrace a transnational party?

Nonnemacher: The argument I make in the paper is very much an electoral argument.��Parties win elections when voters know what they stand for. That’s one of the big theories that we have about party competition, is that parties need to distinguish themselves from their competitors��and be able to communicate to voters what they believe.

If a voter can’t tell the difference between one party and another, they’re unlikely to support them. And if a voter doesn’t know where the party stands, then they don’t know if they’re going to get what they want out of the party. So, parties need to distinguish themselves. They need to signal to voters what their positions are.

One of the motivations here for parties is: This label tells voters where I stand. If I’m seen alongside other Social Democrats, I can kind of bolster my credentials on being a Social Democratic Party.

The other electoral motivation is parties want to win elections, and they look to who won and say, ‘We should copy that.’ In 2021, when the Social Democrats won in Germany, Social Democratic parties across Europe all immediatelylooked to Germany and said, ‘What did they do? How did they win this election? What can we do to��kind of copy that?’

Question: So, it’s not just radical right parties learning from radical right parties in other countries, but also leftist and centrist parties learning from their transnational sister parties?

Nonnemacher: Yes. One of the things I wanted to do in this paper was to make the case that it’s not just the radical right that’s doing this and benefitting from it. It’s the British Labour Party taking lessons from Germany’s Social Democrats, for example.

Green parties are an especially interesting transnational group, because inherently, they see fighting for the environment as a global issue. They view international cooperation and international learning as core to solving the problems that they are running on. Notably, almost all of them have ‘green’ in their name and almost all of them have the sunflower as their logo.

Question: What makes Germany’s AfD party a particularly noteworthy example of a national party forming associations with like-minded parties in Western Europe?

Nonnemacher: There’s probably two reasons for that. One is they exploded in Germany in terms of growing support from 2013 to 2017; the other is that by 2017, the radical right in Europe had exploded. There’s just a lot more attention on the far right, and it’s Germany, so whenever the far right does anything in Germany, people notice.

The AfD is an interesting case, because in 2013 they were not��the far-right party that they are today.��They have had a big transformation in the last 10 to 12 years. In 2013, they were really just angry about the European Union and the Euro crisis, and with Germany having to bail out the rest of the European Union.��They were a Euroskeptic party first and foremost.��They were anti-immigrant, but it wasn’t their main focus.

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France's Marine Le Pen of the French National Rally has helped lead a far-right shift, particularly on immigration, in Europen politics. (Photo: Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick/Wikimedia Commons)

They had a disappointing election in 2013, where they barely missed out on getting seats in the parliament.Then by 2017, they shifted dramatically to the right on immigration.��They really started to copy France’s Le Pen and other prominent, far-right leaders in Europe tobe this anti-immigrant party, just like the rest of these radical right parties,��and that worked out really well for them. In 2017, they became the third-largest party in parliament, so it was a quite successful strategy for them.

By the elections in��2021, they plateaued a little bit,��and then in February this year they became the second largest party in the Bundestag (the German parliament), and they’ve come to be embraced by the broader far-right movement.

Question: Why might a national party choose to distance itself from a sister party?

���DzԲԱ𳾲�������:��There are two family labels where this generally applies. The first is the radical right—or at least that was the case in the past—where if you were seen as too close to the radical right you were punished, because there was a lot of stigmas around being affiliated with that ideology.

With the AfD example, when they made the transition to embrace more radical right principals from other countries and hosted the rally with Le Pen, Wilders and Salvini to signal the AfD’s embrace of transnational radical right parties, this was incredibly controversial, both inside and outside of the party. It was a delicate balance, because there were some in the party who were very nervous that if they embraced the radical right movement they could face a backlash, because Germans are very conscious of their history. So, 10 years ago there was more hesitation about embracing their fellow party members abroad.

We see similar patterns on the left, especially when it comes to communism. Parties on the radical left are generally hesitant to embrace communists or things that look like communism because of the similar kinds of stigmas around that that exist in western and especially eastern Europe.

Question: Do you think voters are consciously recognizing these European family party associations and how their own parties are relating to sister transnational parties, or is it happening at a subconscious level?

Nonnemacher: We know from political psychology that voters rely on�� for a lot of things. So, just hearing the label—that a particular party is a radical right party, for instance, triggers for voters a set of assumptions about what a party stands for and what it’s leaders believe and what they are advocating for.

But I also believe that there is something much more active going on here, where voters start to make those kinds of connections between the party and the label and where voters deliberate what those labels mean in relation to their own politics.

Question: If a national party is not in alignment with its transnational party family on foundational ideological issues, does it cause voter distrust or just confusion?

Nonnemacher: I think it’s a bit of both. Definitely it causes confusion, because if you’re watching the news and you’re being told that Marine Le Pen is a radical right politician, but then let’s say you hear she is endorsing letting more immigrants into (Europe), you’re going to say, ‘Wait a minute; that doesn’t make any sense. How is she radical right, then?’

It also probably leads to distrust. If you see yourself as a Social Democratic voter and you believe in this center-left Social Democratic vision for Europe, but your Social Democratic politician is talking about de-regulating markets and shrinking the state, that’s probably going to make you say, ‘He’s not a Social Democrat. I don’t trust him to be an advocate for my goals.’

Question: Your paper focused a transnational politics in Western Europe. Do you think the paper’s findings have any relevance for the United States?

���DzԲԱ𳾲�������:��I don’t know how well the paper’s findings travel to the United States. We have a very strong two-party system that doesn’t map as neatly to the multi-party competition in European elections. That being said, I think if we look at parties in the United States as factions of various ideological groups, we can see green factions of the Democratic Party, radical right and center-right Christian democratic factions of the Republican Party. I think for activists and people inside these parties, it matters a lot what kind of broader ideological movements that they are associated with are doing.

I’m skeptical that voters will derive the same utility, just because the labels don’t fit as neatly, and (American voters) tend to think we’re unique in our politics as voters, so we don’t tend to look abroad for political inspiration.

Question: Anything else relating to Western European voters and their perceptions of their political parties and transnational parties that you think is important to share?

���DzԲԱ𳾲�������:��I think��understanding how voters perceive their parties is a huge part of what makes democracies work.��If��voters don’t know what their parties are fighting for and don’t know where their parties stand, they check out; they disengage,��and we’ve seen that they become less satisfied with democracy.

I think��anything that parties can do to really communicate their positions to voters and reaffirm for voters that they areserious about accomplishing their goals is important, because parties across Europe and the United States are having a credibility crisis right now.

What my paper does is highlight one such way that parties can go about communicating to voters��what they stand for, which has a whole host of implications to address some of the big problems facing Western democracies today.

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