The extreme right has consolidated its presence across Western Europe. This book presents a compilation of studies on the ideological meanings and political/partisan expressions of the extreme right, their post-war evolution, and the reasons behind the success and failure of various parties. It highlights the rise of a new type of parties that are anti-system rather than neo-fascist.

Abstract. This article has two aims. The first attempts to define the ‘extreme right’political family. The three criteria adopted — spatial, historic‐ideological, attitudinal‐systemic — have led us to identify two types of the extreme right party. One type comprises parties with a fascist imprint (old right‐wing parties); the other comprises recently‐born parties with no fascist associations, but with a right‐wing antisystem attitude (new right‐wing parties). The second aim of this article is to explain the recent ‘unexpected’rise of the new right‐wing parties. Changes in the cultural domain and in mass beliefs have favoured radicalization and system polarization on one side, and the emergence of attitudes and demands not treated by the established conservative parties on the other one. These two broad changes have set the conditions for the rise of extreme right parties.

This paper has a twofold aim: to disentangle the question of party decline, analysing the current meanings and the empirical evidence offered by the literature; to highlight the different and even opposite outcomes of such decline. As far as the party crisis is concerned, contrary to a shared knowledge it is difficult to give a final word. It is suggested that the crisis concerns more a type of party rather than the party per se. Second, the challenges to the party are analysed. In the last decade a convergent attack against the traditional parties has been carried on: on one side, by the new social movements and their partisan representatives, the left-libertarian or New Politics parties; on the other side, by the newly emerged extreme right parties. This paper tries to demonstrate that both types of party are the by-products of the same structural conditions and both provide a (different) answer to the crisis of the party's expressive function.

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This article discusses the state of agony parties are experiencing today. In a nutshell, I argue that parties are now at pains to retain their linkages with society, and that the compensation they envisaged has further damaged them. To respond to sociocultural and economic changes which had weakened parties both in their organizational standing and in their public reputation, parties took a dual route: They went to the state to acquire financial resources and profit in other ways; and they introduced direct democracy practices inside the parties themselves. After discussing how parties have reacted to the changing environment, the article concentrates on intra-party organizational modifications and deals with three basic questions: (a) Why did parties attempt to democratize? (b) What outcome did the democratization, in terms of members’ direct intervention, produce? (c) Is democracy at stake because of the negative impact of the parties’ change and their consequent, persisting, crisis of legitimacy?