GEC Research Fellow and Lecturer at the Chinese University of Kong Kong James F. Downes, published an article in JCMS, together with Matthew Loveless, Associate Professor at the University of Bologna and Andrew Lam, Associate Lecturer at The Open University of Hong Kong. The article is entitled “The Looming Refugee Crisis in the EU: Right-Wing Party Competition and Strategic Positioning” and was published in the Journal of Common Market Studies earlier this year.
The authors argue that some centre right parties recognize the electoral opportunity for radical right parties to exploit the refugee crisis for electoral gains and strategically adopt hard-line positions on immigration to maintain and even increase their electoral success. Strategic positioning is found to be a successful strategy for centre right parties.
Read an article on the GEC blog, based on the article here.