ABSTRACT
The question of who makes immigration policy focuses on the relationship between policy actors and outcomes, but is directly related to the constraints within which policy-makers shape policy. While the radical right in Europe has been generally isolated from making policy, with the exception, of course, of Austria since 1999, it has, I would argue, been a major force in constraining and shaping the way immigration policy was developed in many countries in the 1990s. A decade ago, Martin Baldwin-Edwards and I outlined an approach to the politics of immigration in which we stressed: ‘how immigration has emerged as a political issue, how the politics of immigration have been constructed, and what have been the consequences of this construction for politics in Western Europe’ (Baldwin-Edwards and Schain 1994: 1). That volume did not contain a single chapter on the relationship between the radical right and immigration policy, but its
influence is noted in passing in all of the chapters that deal with specific countries (France, Britain, Austria, Germany and Italy). Thus, although ten years ago the impact of the radical right on immigration policy was noted throughout, we never integrated these references into our analytical framework. This contribution is an attempt to deal with that oversight. It appears that
the least examined aspect of the emergence of the radical right during the past 20 years is its impact on politics and policy. I will first develop an approach to understand impact, and then analyse it in some detail in the context of party developments, where the impact of parties of the radical right are crucial. I will look first at the impact of electoral breakthrough, then the impact of organisational development and on party success on its own evolution, then policy-making and policy. Although each of these aspects has been examined and analysed in somewhat different ways, my objective here is to find a way to understand impact in relation to the constraints within which policy-makers shape policy. I will examine both indirect impact on immigration policy, through the impact on the party system itself, as well as more direct impact, when the radical right actually has policy-making capacities. Most of this article is devoted to an analysis of the French National Front (FN), but I will return to implications for comparative analysis in the conclusion. Typically, political parties first gain attention not at the moment they are
formed, but at the moment when they achieve an electoral breakthrough that is sufficient to have an impact on the variation of support within the party system. This development can be achieved in two ways: through conversion of voters who had previously voted for other political parties, or through mobilisation of either new voters or voters who had previously been abstainers. If this breakthrough endures, it can result in an electoral realignment within the party system, in the context of a critical election or series of elections (Burnham 1970; Sundquist 1973; Andersen 1979; Martin 1998: 153-160). Of course, as the French experience amply demonstrates, parties that achieve short-term success only infrequently have long-term electoral impact. Nevertheless, even short-term breakthrough can have a significant impact on public policy if established parties readjust their agendas in reaction to this success. This is the core analysis that was generally applied to the impact of radical right parties in our volume ten years ago. Thus, in the initial phase, as voters transfer their support from other
parties, the impact on the party system is felt most intensely by those parties from which the transfers take place. For them, the problem is how to recapture the votes they have lost, and how to prevent further erosion. Discussions tend to focus on the new issues that attracted the initial surge of voters to the upstart parties. This was particularly true of radical right party emergence, perhaps because of the shock-effect of the way they developed the immigration issue. At this stage, the transfer of votes is frequently seen
by journalists and scholars alike as a passing ‘protest vote’ – as it was by Dominique Schnapper in 1994, with regard to the FN – by a part of the electorate against established parties that have ignored their interests and concerns.1
