Events

This event is jointly organised with the DPIR Politics Colloquium.

Abstract: This study develops a model of how political polarization shapes mainstream parties’ responses to extremist competitors. It distinguishes the adoption of a cordon sanitaire, which restricts a party’s own cooperation with extremists, from institutional interventions that constrain extremists’ participation in political competition. The latter interventions can take the form of party or association bans and electoral reforms. Voters evaluate parties according to policy proximity and democratic legitimacy, while mainstream parties anticipate the electoral and governmental consequences of exclusion. The model generates two linked predictions. First, polarization can weaken incentives to maintain a cordon sanitaire by increasing voters’ policy costs of sanctioning extremist cooperation and parties’ costs of governing across the democratic center. Second, polarization can encourage asymmetric exclusion of extremist parties. In this scenario, an incumbent coalition may preserve cooperation with its own extremist while seeking to prohibit the extremist supporting its rival. This strategy becomes attractive when the rival cannot recapture enough displaced voters to offset the loss of extremist support. Polarization can therefore simultaneously encourage accommodation within ideological blocs and intensify exclusion across them.

The Political Science Seminar Series is convened by Desmond King and David Rueda For more information on this or any of the seminars in the series, please contact politics.secretary@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.