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How To React To Right-Wing Populist Challengers? Lessons From UK Mainstream Parties
This article investigates how and why the European mainstream responds to the challenge of right-wing populist parties (RWPP), by analyzing the UK case. Using a mixed methodological approach, which includes the theoretical tools of historical institutionalism, classifications of mainstream parties strategies, and Heinze's approach to analyzing the factors of strategy choice, we survey the strategic responses of the UK political mainstream (Conservatives and Labour), towards RWPP (UK Independence Party). Findings suggest that the political mainstream could move from exclusion strategies, to predominantly inclusion strategies. In the UK case, accommodation of UKIP’s policy positions with political and legal isolation. Transiting to these strategies takes place under the influence of the electoral and ideological development of UKIP, the salience of migration issues, strategies of other mainstream parties and the historical conditions that define the available options and shape the selection process, in the UK – party-based Euroscepticism