Challenges of Radical Left and Left-wing Populist Parties for Party Competition and Coalition Politics in Western Europe

The prominence of radical and populist parties has increased in Western European party systems over the past few decades. Though we have seen a substantial increase in academic literature on the radical right party family, we have yet to understand the role of radical left parties in a systematic cross-sectional approach. The more polarised political systems become, the more important it is to carefully disentangle the influence radical parties can have on the individual and party level. This research proposes studying radical left parties on both the national and the subnational level in selected Western European countries—Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden—to analyse their influence on the programmatic strategies of competing parties and on coalition politics. This project collects and evaluates party manifestos and social media data to analyse internal conflicts of radical left parties and their influence on party competition and coalition politics.