Anthony J. McGann and Herbert Kitschelt, "The Radical Right in the Alps: Evolution of Support for the Swiss SVP and Austrian FPÖ," Party Politics, 11 (March, 2005), 147-171.

First Paragraph:
In October 1999, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) won 26.9 percent of the vote in the Austrian legislative elections of that year, a few hundred votes ahead of the Austrian People's Party (ÖVP), while the Swiss People's Party (SVP) attracted 22.6 percent of the vote in the Swiss parliamentary elections, ahead of the Swiss liberals, with 19.9 percent. In 2003, the SVP became the largest party in the Swiss Nationalrat with 26.7 percent of the vote. These are the only far-right1 parties in advanced post-industrial countries that have ever reached or exceeded the electoral support level of their largest established non-socialist competitors. This article analyzes the evolution and support of these parties, using survey data from the Swiss National Election Study 1999 and a survey from Austria in 1998.2 We find that both parties fit the profile of a 'new radical-right' party (Kitschelt, 1995), and that they have evolved in that direction over time. They both, however, retain elements of the support bases they had before they became new radical-right parties, which may explain in part why they are larger than their counterparts elsewhere.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. Support for SVP 1999 and FPÖ 1998 by occupational categories
Table 2. Support for SVP, AutoPartei (AP) 1991 and FPÖ 1990 by occupational categories
Table 3. Voter flow to SVP: SVP supporters by vote in 1995 federal elections
Table 4. The ideological dispositions of the SVP and FPÖ electorates in comparison (mean factor scores by party, standard errors in parentheses)
Table 5. The ideological determinants of SVP or FPÖ vote choice (multinomial logistic regression results)

First paragraph of Conclusion:
Despite winning a rather larger vote share, the Austrian FPÖ and Swiss SVP fit into patterns similar to other European 'new radical-right' parties. That is, they conform to the 'winning formula' for 'new radical-right' parties, combining xenophobic appeals with free-market economics and sociocultural conservatism, resulting in an electorate in which small business owners, farmers, retirees and blue-collar workers are over-represented. During the 1990s, both the FPÖ and SVP have gravitated in this direction. We can reject the alternative hypotheses that these parties can be described as single-issue, protest or extreme-right parties. However, the Betz and Immerfall characterization of the FPÖ as a neo-populist party is consistent with our data, as their predictions on the composition of the party's electorates generally overlap with those of a new radical-right party. While the Kitschelt 'winning formula' fits our two cases well, it is necessary to amend it to take account of the softening of the neoliberalism of many new radicalright parties during the 1990s. It is probable that the 'winning formula' does not require a consistent neoliberalism, but rather a compromise that is sufficiently free-market to appeal to petty bourgeois voters, but does not alienate working-class support by attacking the welfare state too vigorously, while at the same time promising protectionism favorable to both.