The Messages from the Populist Radical Right : A Comparison of European Right-Wing Populist Parties’ Ideological Core

The aim of the paper is to do a quantitative comparison of the manifestos from a number of European parties that are being put in a mutual party family often referred to as “radical right-wing populist”. The main primary source is the Comparative Manifesto Project database from which the data was gathered for analysis. A number of variables which operationalise typical traits of the party family were picked from the codebook of the database and the parties’ values of these variables were compared and presented in diagrams. Through the analysis it was shown that the parties vary to a great extent in what they put the greatest focus on in their manifestos. It could also be concluded that even parties which had similar values in one category still brought it up from different angles. The essay also brings up suggestions for future research within the same area of research.