This dissertation addresses the puzzling persistence of farmers’ influence over politics and policymaking in Europe, despite a dramatic decline in their population and share of economic output. I redeploy theories commonly used to explain welfare state retrenchment to the domain of agricultural policy.

Farmers today account for less than 5 percent of Europe’s population, and agriculture’s contribution to GDP is under 2 percent, yet farmers have repeatedly blocked reform initiatives and extracted new commitments of support. My project describes and explains how farmers have both thwarted proposed agricultural policy spending cuts and contained proposed reforms. It also accounts for the conditions that have facilitated limited instances of reform.

I contend that contemporary farmer power is grounded in four sources: sophisticated organizations, control of the policy space, sympathetic public opinion, and the unique nature of agricultural production. These updated tools have allowed farmers to remain politically influential despite their declining numbers.

Given the resilient power of farmers, I find that reforming agricultural policy is an exercise in managing the claims of farmers. In essence, European agricultural policies are welfare for farmers. In the same way that governments seeking to retrench welfare programs must contend with program claimants, agricultural policy reformers must manage the interests of farmers. A common outcome across reforms is that farmers defend the budget. In exchange for preserving the budget, farmers often accept administrative policy change. Because reformers often use welfare state retrenchment techniques when engaging in Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reform, these policy outcomes tend to include compensation for affected claimants, changes to rules and standards, and reforms that seek to improve efficiency and equality of current programs rather than the creation of new programs. Outcomes also depend on how farmers exercise their power. When, for example, their control of the policy space begins to slip, reformers may be able to impose stricter rules and requirements upon farmers.

Important also in accounting for the contents of the final reform are the conditions under which reform takes place. When reform coincides with other periods of major negotiation or change, like enlargement or trade talks, changes to the operation of core CAP policies become possible. When such concurrent events are absent, it becomes incredibly difficult for reformers to enact any change at all to existing policy.

The dissertation draws on a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence collected over six multi-month fieldwork trips to Belgium, France, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and brief sojourns to Austria and Ireland. To construct a set of structured case studies, I conducted over one hundred interviews with local, national, and European Union officials. I spoke with current and former members of parliament, government ministers, leaders of farmer organizations, and officials from the European Commission, including several former agricultural commissioners. This unusually rich set of interviews, supplemented by information from EU documents and other data sources, provides the foundation for multiple case studies of major CAP Reform. In these case studies, I systematically analyze the causal processes at work in agricultural reform efforts.

The dissertation’s argument and findings deepen the current understanding of how agricultural policy reform occurs and challenges the widely held notion that farmers are politically irrelevant. The findings of the dissertation demonstrate the efficacy of applying welfare state arguments outside of the domain of the traditional social welfare state. Finally, the dissertation has important implications beyond just agricultural policy, including policy making in the European Union, the handling of powerful groups in social welfare policy creation and reform, and the management of social class decline.

As long as far-right parties – known chiefly for their vehement opposition to immigration – have competed in contemporary Western Europe, scholars and observers have been concerned about these parties’ implications for liberal democracy. Many originally believed that far- right parties would fade away due to a lack of voter support and their isolation by mainstream parties. Since 1994, however, far-right parties have been included in 17 governing coalitions across Western Europe. What explains the switch from exclusion to inclusion in Europe, and what drives mainstream-right parties’ decisions to include or exclude the far right from coalitions today?

My argument is centered on the cost of far-right exclusion, in terms of both office and policy goals for the mainstream right. I argue, first, that the major mainstream parties of Western Europe initially maintained the exclusion of the far right because it was relatively costless: They could govern and achieve policy goals without the far right. During this period of exclusion, however, major parties of both the left and right attempted to win back voters lost to the far right by enacting more restrictive immigration policies; they would borrow from the far right as long as it was beneficial.

Second, I argue that the mainstream right has increasingly treated the far right as it would any other party during coalition decisions. Major mainstream parties prioritize being in government, and will select the coalition that offers both stability and the ability to achieve policy goals in areas of greatest importance to them at the time. As the far right continued to attract voters throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the mainstream right realized that working with the far right – which was now a more useful partner, as it had more legislative seats – might result in more advantageous policy compromises. Once far-right parties could be useful to the mainstream right, exclusion became a more costly strategy.

Third, far-right parties can be attractive coalition partners to the mainstream right be- cause they are flexible on most issues – immigration excepted – and thus more willing to give the mainstream right its preferred policies in exchange for gains in immigration. Additionally, far-right parties are nearly always smaller than the major mainstream-right parties, so the mainstream parties are able to carry more weight in coalition decisions and obtain important ministerial positions.

I demonstrate my argument through in-depth case studies of Austria and the Netherlands, from the 1980s through the present. Both countries have had far-right parties in and out of government, providing important variation on the dependent variable. Finally, I show the wider applicability of my argument in two ways by extending my arguments about inclusion and exclusion to coalition-like agreements in the United Kingdom and France, as well as to mainstream left responses to far-left parties in Europe.