Cold pragmatism, warm radicalism : ideological differences between radical left parties from Nordic and Southern European countries

• Autor(a) principal: Lourenço, Pedro Miguel Cardoso
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/22877
• topic: Pragmatismo; Radicalismo; Partidos políticos; Política europeia - Europa Ocidental; Ideologias

The 2008 economic crisis brought an increasing support for some Western European radical left parties (RLPs) and renewed academic attention to this party family. Still, there is a lack of empirical knowledge on the ideological differences among RLPs – particularly across countries and regions. The present work conducts for the first time a systematic and direct cross-regional comparison of the ideological differences between RLPs from two different European regions (Nordic and Southern European countries). Manifesto and expert survey data are used for measuring and comparing party positions along several ideological dimensions and to evaluate to what extent a region-based ideological classification of RLPs finds empirical support. The results show that while some important ideological differences are found between Nordic and Southern European RLPs, these do not appear to be significant enough to classify them into two distinct ideological subgroups. Moreover, the results also suggest that, to compare the ideological differences between RLPs, we need more precise empirical instruments adapted to the study of its most characteristic ideological traits.