Premium
How (not) to operationalise subnational political opportunity structures: A critique of Kestilä and Söderlund's study of regional elections
Author(s) -
ARZHEIMER KAI,
CARTER ELISABETH
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.00842.x
Subject(s) - politics , spurious relationship , political science , political opportunity , aggregate data , positive economics , control (management) , political economy , sociology , economics , law , social movement , management , medicine , pathology , machine learning , computer science
Based on an aggregate analysis of the French regional elections of 2004, Kestilä and Söderlund, in their 2007 article, ‘Subnational Political Opportunity Structures and the Success of the Radical Right: Evidence from the March 2004 Regional Elections in France’, examine the impact of subnational political opportunity structures on the success of the radical right and argue that such an approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross‐national analyses. The present article disputes this claim on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrates that their empirical findings are spurious.