At the geographical and ideological fringes. The success of populist radical right parties in peripheral regions

Recent studies point to significant regional differences in the electoral success of the populist radical right. Extant explanations of these patterns have all focused primarily on economic factors, framed as current economic hardship, left-behindedness, or long-term decline. We put forward a new explanation: the location of a locality within the nation-state. Specifically, we argue that populist radical right parties are able to capitalize on long-standing grievances and attitudes in peripheral regions, which often predate the emergence of these parties. Analyzing results from national parliamentary and European elections in the Czech Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany at the county and municipality levels, we show that a region's location in the nation state influences voting behavior even when controlling for present and past economic circumstances. Ours is the first study on the contextual determinants of populist radical right success that analyses two countries jointly by combining election results from both countries in a single dataset. Certain regions have been peripheral for a long time and have seen strong results for other challenger parties in the past. Hence, our contribution points to an important role for changes on the supply-side of party competition to explain the recent rise of the AfD and the SPD.