Inside the Radical Right

Abstract

What explains the cross-national variation in the radical right's electoral success over the last several decades? Challenging existing structural and institutional accounts, this book analyzes the dynamics of party building and explores the attitudes, skills and experiences of radical right activists in eleven different countries. Based on extensive field research and an original data set of radical right candidates for office, David Art links the quality of radical right activists to broader patterns of success and failure. He demonstrates how a combination of historical legacies and incentive structures produced activists who helped party building in some cases and doomed it in others. In an age of rising electoral volatility and the fading of traditional political cleavages, Inside the Radical Right makes a strong case for the importance of party leaders and activists as masters of their own fate.

The Ideational Approach to Populism

“…In this respect, it is worth noting that the word "populism" comes from two movements of the late nineteenth century characterized by their leaderless nature: the US people's party and the Russian Narodnik (Taggart 2000). These cases reveal that manifestations of populism do not necessarily lead to the rise of strong and charismatic leaders, while the literature on populist radical right parties in contemporary Europe has demonstrated that populist forces can advance within strong party organizations (e.g., Art 2011;Mudde 2007).…”

“Don't Mention the War!” how Populist Right‐Wing Radicalism Became (Almost) Normal in Germany

“…This does not mean that anti-semitism and authoritarian tendencies disappeared over night. However, openly extremist statements became increasingly stigmatised, which set in motion a virtuous cycle (Art, 2011): politically ambitious right-wingers had to moderate to pursue a career in the mainstream parties, whereas fringe parties could only attract politically inept extremists. In turn, these parties (most notably the NPD, which enjoyed a brief series of successes in state elections during the 1960s but rapidly declined after they failed to win representation in the 1969 federal election), were riddled with factionalism and became even more radical and isolated.…”

Seizing the Opportunity: Euroscepticism and Extremist Party Success in the Post-Maastricht Era

“…Also, the LPF's more ambiguous position on the EU (see the Netherlands opportunity space map in the Appendix) was probably more palatable than the vehemently anti‐integration one of the CD. A supply‐side explanation is also readily available: scholars have attributed some of the LPF's early success in 2002 to the charisma of Pim Fortuyn himself . In Table , the subsequent election (also held in 2002) appears as a deviant case – the success of the LPF during the first election was not repeated in the second, despite a lower than average permissive consensus score in the Dutch population.…”