West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal of attention over the past two decades due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support across Western Europe during this period. This article puts forward an explanation of the variation in the right-wing extremist party vote across Western Europe that incorporates a wider range of factors than have been considered previously. It begins by examining the impact of socio-demographic variables on the right-wing extremist party vote. Then, it turns its attention to a whole host of structural factors that may potentially affect the extreme right party vote, including institutional, party-system and conjunctural variables. The article concludes with an assessment of which variables have the most power in explaining the uneven electoral success of right-wing extremist parties across Western Europe. The findings go some way towards challenging the conventional wisdom as to how the advance of the parties of the extreme right may be halted.West European right-wing extremist parties have received a great deal attention in the academic literature due to their electoral success. What has received less coverage, however, is the fact that these parties have not enjoyed a consistent level of electoral support in this third wave of right-wing extremist party activity; instead, their electoral fortunes have risen and fallen over the last two decades.That this variation -both over time and across countries -has attracted relatively little attention in the literature is not overly surprising. For one thing, there continues to be a shortage of comparative studies on the extreme right, particularly on its voters. In addition, many of the studies that do exist, not surprisingly have tended to focus only on why right-wing extremist parties have been successful, rather than on why they have not.The few works that have addressed the issue of the variation in the electoral support for the parties of the extreme right across Western Europe have tended to offer only partial explanations for this phenomenon. Jackman and Volpert (1996), for example, assess the importance of electoral system, party system and economic factors on the right-wing extremist party vote, but they do not consider the impact of different socio-demographic variables. Likewise, Abedi (2002) concentrates on the effect of party system factors, but fails to

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Right-wing extremism/radicalism: reconstructing the conceptThis article reconstructs the concept of right-wing extremism/radicalism. Using Mudde's influential 1995 study as a foundation, it first canvasses the recent academic literature to explore how the concept has been described and defined. It suggests that, despite the frequent warnings that we lack an unequivocal definition of this concept, there is actually a high degree of consensus amongst the definitions put forward by different scholars. However, it argues that the characteristics mentioned in some of the definitions have not been organized meaningfully. It therefore moves on to distinguish between the defining properties of right-wing extremism/radicalism and the accompanying ones, and in so doing it advances a minimal definition of the concept as an ideology that encompasses authoritarianism, anti-democracy, and exclusionary and/or holistic nationalism.

The sine qua non of representative democracies is a process of elections that is fair and competitive. This is the role of electoral institutions, which determine how elections are fought, how the act of voting results in the election of political representatives and the determination of which political leader (in a presidential system), or party or set of parties (in a parliamentary system), is to form the executive leadership for the next few years.Electoral institutions cover a multitude of responsibilities. This chapter deals with two: the electoral system, which is responsible for determining how the voting act translates into an election result; and election management bodies, providing the over-arching structure within which the electoral process occurs. We spend most time on the first of these issues, starting in section 2.1 with a classification of the world's different electoral systems. This is followed, in section 2.2, by a review of the main political consequences of electoral systems. Section 2.3 deals with questions relating to electoral system design and reform. In section 2.4 our attention shifts to a focus on the issue of election management, with an overview of how this varies across our range of democracies. Classifying electoral systems1 We are grateful to Hein Heuvelman and Joanna Rozanska for gathering the data used in Table 2.2, and to our editors for their advice and feedback; the usual disclaimer applies.

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