Neighbors and Friends: How Do Right-wing Parties Compensate for Globalization?

This paper explores the relationship between globalization and party positions accounting for potential differences between left- and right-wing parties. According to our theoretical priors we expect that parties respond to globalization in a different way depending on their ideology and social groups of representation. The empirical analysis is based on a panel model of 34 political parties in 17 Western European countries between 1970 and 2010. We find that right-wing parties move leftward in response to globalization while left-wing parties do not alter their position, or move rightward. Additionally, we find that parties ideological positions are affected by foreign parties’ positions of the same ideological bloc giving support to party policy diffusion argument. The main findings appear remarkably robust to additional econometric techniques such as instrumental variables, Jackknife and methods that account for cross-sectional dependence. The findings in total give support for the existence of party system convergence towards left due to the right-wing party moderation.