What role does nationalism play in European party politics? Both at the national level and within the European Parliament, party competition has increasingly aligned along a transnational dimension, with cosmopolitan parties advocating for immigration and European integration, while nationalist parties oppose these issues. While this trend is widely acknowledged, this article presented shows that nationalism is far more diverse in multinational European democracies, where majority and minority nationalist parties compete.
Previous research has often equated nationalism with majority nativism, cultural conservatism, and authoritarian values. This study, however, draws on three rounds of the EPAC (Ethnonationalism in Party Competition) expert survey, designed to measure nationalist ideology separately from cultural values, and to differentiate majority from minority nationalism.
A comparative analysis of 2011, 2017, and 2024 reveals that nationalism has grown in some multinational countries. Unlike majority nationalists, minority nationalist parties combine their nationalist ideology with a broader range of cultural values and varied positions on key policy issues.