Radical right populist parties in the 21st Century. Comparison of the policy influence of populists in Switzerland and France.

In the last quarter of the 20th Century, radical right populist parties have developed and strengthened their electoral weight in Europe. However, since the end of the 1990s, they have also increasingly been legitimized and gained access to legislative and executive powers. This is the case, for instance, in Italy, Austria, Poland, Hungary, The Netherlands or in Scandinavian countries. In other countries, they face more difficulties to reach power but tend to be considered by mainstream parties as a serious electoral threat. Because of their proximity with power, the role and the influence of radical right populist parties on policy-making becomes a puzzling question. This paper thus aims to investigate the influence of such parties on policy-making, in a comparative perspective. Two dissimilar cases are compared. The French Front national (FN), a party traditionally marginalized in the institutions at the national level, is compared to the Swiss Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), the major political party at the National Council and member of the Swiss federal government for several decades. Based on the process-tracing method, the influence of these parties on policy in the law and order sector is assessed and the way they try to be influent is analyzed. If both of these parties are influent at the agenda setting stage of policy-making, their influence capacity tends to diverge at the following stages. This distinction mainly results from the electoral system and from the fact that direct democracy tools are available in Switzerland and, therefore, can be mobilized by the SVP in order to influence the entire policy-making process.