Conservatism
According to Alan Ware, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom retained viable conservative parties into the 1980s. Ware said that Australia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malta, New Zealand, Spain and the United States had no conservative parties, although they had either Christian democrats or liberals as major right-wing parties. Canada, Ireland and Portugal had right-wing political parties that defied categorization: the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada; Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Progressive Democrats in Ireland; and the Social Democratic Party of Portugal. Since then, the Swiss People's Party has moved to the extreme right and is no longer considered to be conservative.
National conservatism
National conservative parties in different countries do not necessarily share a common position on economic policy: their views may range from support of a planned economy to a centrist mixed economy to a "laissez-faire" approach. In the first, more common, case, national conservatives can be distinguished from liberal conservatives, for whom free market economic policies, deregulation and tight spending are the main priorities. Some commentators have indeed identified a growing gap between national and economic liberal conservatism: "most parties of the Right [today] are run by economically liberal conservatives who, in varying degrees, have marginalized social, cultural, and national conservatives."