Institutions and issues, values and priorities: A re-examination of parties of cultural identity

Current research on parties of cultural identity tends to classify them using unidimensional dichotomous means. However, nationalist parties tend to operate in multi-dimensional space, meaning that the single criterion on which they are often classified reduces them to the point where their classification ignores one or more of their vital elements. This dissertation establishes a two-dimensional classification scheme for nationalist political parties based on two of the variables most commonly used to classify them: The first establishes whether the party deliberately excludes others from its identity group. The second establishes the geopolitical identity and goal of the party: supporting an existing nation-state, a regionalist party that desires autonomy for the region, or a regionalist party that desires to withdraw the region from the nation-state.

The dissertation focuses on the member-states of the European Union of the 1990s as well as those countries which were candidates for membership during this same time period. Upon classifying each viable nationalist party into a nationalist cleavage using the two-dimensional scale mentioned above, I engage in a series of models that examine the differences in each cleavage in terms of the demographics of party supporters, their ideological beliefs, their attitudes toward outsiders, their geopolitical identities, and the sources of their frustration (i.e., the state, the political system, or the people in government). Upon establishing the utility of the classification system, I then apply it as a means of predicting where a party in a given cleavage will fall on a given political issue. In this case, that issue is confidence in the European Union.