Do radical right parties present blurry economic stances, or have they clarified their positions while moving towards the economic left? This article questions the strategic behaviour of radical right parties in Western Europe. It shows that although radical right parties have increased their discussion of economic issues, and expert placements of this party family on the economic dimension have become more centrist over time, the uncertainty surrounding these placements continues to be higher for the radical right than any other party family in Europe. The article then moves on to examine to what extent voter‐party congruence on redistribution, immigration and other issues of social lifestyle predict an individual's propensity to vote for the radical right compared to other parties. Although redistribution is the component of economic policy where the radical right seems to be centrist, the findings indicate that it remains party‐voter congruence on immigration that drives support for radical right parties, while the congruence level for redistribution has an insignificant effect. The article concludes that while radical right parties seem to have included some clearly left‐leaning economic proposals, which shifted the general expert views of these parties to the economic centre, their overall economic profiles remain as blurry as ever.

Stigmatisation has been recognised as a major factor influencing the fortunes of populist radical right (PRR) parties. While scholars have examined it by taking parties as units of analysis, this study focuses on the individual level by asking Which PRR party members are more likely to feel stigmatised? After offering a novel theoretical explanation for feelings of stigmatisation based on the personal networks in which PRR grassroots members are embedded, it then investigates stigma using an original membership survey of about 7,000 members of the Sweden Democrats (SD) and interviews with 30 of them. The survey results show that the higher the educational qualification PRR grassroots members have achieved, the more likely they will feel stigmatised. In addition, those who have never had any relatives and/or friends in the SD, and those who are employed in the public sector, are more likely to consider membership discrediting. The interview data shed light on the survey results, by illustrating how public employees and university students find it hard to be open about their membership as they are surrounded by people with left‐wing views. By contrast, having relatives and/or friends who are members of the party reduces the stigma of joining PRR parties, becoming active in them, and talking about politics in public. Along with countering some of the prevailing wisdom about stigmatisation in PRR parties, the findings contribute to our understanding of PRR grassroots membership, which has long been an overlooked topic in the literature.

Recent political changes in established democracies have led to a new cleavage, often described as a juxtaposition of ‘winners’ and ‘losers of globalization’. Despite a growing interest in subjective group membership and identity, previous research has not studied whether individuals actually categorize themselves as globalization winners or losers and what effect this has. Based on survey data from Germany, we report evidence of a division between self‐categorized globalization winners and losers that is partially but not completely rooted in social structure and associated with attitudes towards globalization‐related issues and party choices. We thereby confirm many of the assumptions from prior research – such as that (self‐categorized) losers of globalization tend to hold lower levels of education and lean towards the radical right. At the same time, the self‐categorizations are not merely transmission belts of socio‐structural effects but seem to be politically consequential in their own right. We conclude that the categories of globalization winners and losers have the potential to form part of the identity component of the globalization cleavage and are important for understanding how political entrepreneurs appeal to voters on their side of the new divide.

The article discusses some of the paradoxes of minority accommodation in Eastern Europe 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the course of doing so, it focuses on four specific issues: volatility, sequencing, a shift from nationalism (group) to social conservatism (grid), and on the radicalisation of mainstream parties. Volatility is tied to the ebb and flow of shifts in the status quo associated with minority accommodation, which elucidates both why radical right mobilisation accelerates and why it loses steam. The expansion of minority rights leads to political ‘extreme reactions’. Sequencing matters since minority accommodation coincided with democratisation in Eastern Europe, so the struggle over minority rights is confounded with a concurrent regime change. Shifts from group to grid refer to the recent rise in socially conservative issues as sources of polarisation. Finally, extremist parties can threaten democratic pluralism. Nevertheless, large radicalised mainstream parties that control parliaments, not small extremist parties, subvert the institutions of democratic oversight. The threat originates from the mainstream and is exacerbated by the fact that liberal democracy has not ‘locked in’ in most of Eastern Europe.

The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRP) in Europe has led to an unprecedented number of publications focused on this phenomenon. While many of these studies analyse the causes of this rise, much less attention has been paid to its effects. Previous research has shown the success of their xenophobic arguments in conditioning the public debate. However, to what degree public opinion has normalised this discourse remains unclear. This study aims to address whether the electoral success of the PRRP leads to changes in anti-immigration attitudes across twenty-one European countries. Although the previous analysis confirms that the presence of these parties has increased significantly, examining data from European Social Survey (ESS), the results reveal two key findings: a shift towards a more favourable perception of immigration among some sectors of the population and a limited effect of the contextual factors, including the presence of the PRRP.

This lecture addresses the political impact of the Great Recession in a context of rising inequalities and retrenching welfare states. Do hard times fuel apathy or revolt, abstention or support for the extremes, and more particularly, in the European context, for thriving radical rights? To answer these questions, I shall take the case of France, in the 2012 presidential election, the first post-crisis one. I shall focus on the poor, the disadvantaged: those hardest hit by the recession.

Fifteen years ago, Rydgren (Scand Polit Stud 25(1):27–56, 2002) asked why no electorally successful radical right-wing party had yet emerged in Sweden. In this respect, Sweden was a negative case. Rydgren posited four main explanations: (1) social class mattered more in Sweden than elsewhere. Working-class voters identified strongly with their social class and with the Social Democratic party, making them largely unavailable to radical right-wing mobilization; (2) socioeconomic issues still structured most politics in Sweden, and issues belonging to the sociocultural dimension—most importantly immigration—were of low salience for voters; (3) voters still perceived clear policy alternatives across the left-right divide; and (4) the leading radical right-wing alternative, the Sweden Democrats, was perceived as being too extreme. Since 2010, however, Sweden can no longer be considered a negative case, and in this article, we argue that in order to understand the rise and growth of the Sweden Democrats, we should focus on changes in the factors enumerated above.

The rise of the radical right fundamentally changes the face of electoral competition in Western Europe. Bipolar competition is becoming tripolar, as the two dominant party poles of the twentieth century – the left and the centre‐right – are challenged by a third pole of the radical right. Between 2000 and 2015, the radical right has secured more than 12 per cent of the vote in over ten Western European countries. This article shows how electoral competition between the three party poles plays out at the micro level of social classes. It presents a model of class voting that distinguishes between classes that are a party's preserve, classes that are contested strongholds of two parties and classes over which there is an open competition. Using seven rounds of the European Social Survey, it shows that sociocultural professionals form the party preserve of the left, and large employers and managers the preserve of the centre‐right. However, the radical right competes with the centre‐right for the votes of small business owners, and it challenges the left over its working‐class stronghold. These two contested strongholds attest to the co‐existence of old and new patterns of class voting. Old patterns are structured by an economic conflict: Production workers vote for the left and small business owners for the centre‐right based on their economic attitudes. In contrast, new patterns are linked to the rise of the radical right and structured by a cultural conflict.

This symposium probes contemporary classifications of the “far-right”, “populist radical right” and “radical right” variety. It also considers whether there is a need to look beyond socio-economic factors to explain the upward trajectory such parties experienced in recent years. The symposium thus connects to ongoing debates regarding the nature of this party family (or families) and to previous accounts of their successes across Western Europe.

What can explain the strong euroscepticism of radical parties of both the right and the left? This article argues that the answer lies in the paradoxical role of nationalism as a central element in both party families, motivating opposition towards European integration. Conventionally, the link between nationalism and euroscepticism is understood solely as a prerogative of radical right‐wing parties, whereas radical left‐wing euroscepticism is associated with opposition to the neoliberal character of the European Union. This article contests this view. It argues that nationalism cuts across party lines and constitutes the common denominator of both radical right‐wing and radical left‐wing euroscepticism. It adopts a mixed‐methods approach, combining intensive case study analysis with quantitative analysis of party manifestos. First, it traces the link between nationalism and euroscepticism in Greece and France in order to demonstrate the internal validity of the argument. It then undertakes a cross‐country statistical estimation to assess the external validity of the argument and its generalisability across Europe.

During the pandemic, science became one of the most salient issues in European polities. At the same time, relevant sectors of European societies were sceptical about science-driven policy to contain the pandemic (e.g., lockdowns or vaccine mandates). The literature so far has analysed the relevance of trust in experts and trust in science in determining compliance to pandemic-related policies. However, we still do not know what are the drivers that lead to (dis)trust science. In this paper, we contribute to fill this gap, by analysing the association between technocratic and populist attitudes and trust in science. Using a novel survey, fielded in Italy, among a sample of 5.000 respondents, we show that populism and technocracy are strongly related with (dis)trust in science in opposite directions.

The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so‐called ‘verrechtsing’ (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition and failure in government. In fact, there are at least three reasons why PRRPs might increase their impact in the near future: the tabloidisation of political discourse; the aftermath of the economic crisis; and the learning curve of PRRPs. Even in the unlikely event that PRRPs will become major players in West European politics, it is unlikely that this will lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system. PRRPs are not a normal pathology of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalisation of mainstream values.

‘Welfare chauvinism’ (or ‘welfare ethnocentrism,’ when directed against native‐born ethnic minorities) is a declination of nativism within the social policy domain and a common element of populist radical right discourse. Previous studies have shown that this rhetoric can influence how people perceive the deservingness and entitlement of certain groups to welfare rights. In this study, we propose it has additional effects by evoking a purported lack of reciprocity in what concerns benefits from, and contributions to, the welfare system, such rhetoric can also justify and legitimize discrimination against out‐groups in other domains that are unrelated to welfare. We use a pre‐registered experiment embedded in a survey of a nationally representative sample of the Portuguese population to examine whether individuals who are exposed to the issue of illegitimate ‘takers’ of the welfare system become more likely to express discriminatory intentions regarding an out‐group's freedom of movement and establishment. We find that in the Portuguese context, where the populist radical right frequently portrays the Roma minority as welfare abusers, highlighting the issue of reciprocity can trigger a sizeable increase in discriminatory intentions against the Romani even in domains unrelated to welfare rights.

In this article, we investigate the ideology of the populist radical right (PRR) and the extent to which its political message has changed over time. In doing so, we also judge the usefulness of the PRR-tag. Like seminal scholarship on these parties, we contend that both economic and social positions are relevant for contemporary radical right parties. Further, we argue that contemporary parties’ stances are indicative of a nationalist ideology. Using the Manifesto Project Dataset, we investigate radical right policy preferences between 1970 and 2015. Results indicate that right-wing economic stances are more prevalent prior to the twenty-first century and that radical right parties increasingly make economically leftist claims. Results also demonstrate that radical right parties are not always the farthest to right in national political spaces. Further, we show that contemporary parties make nationalist claims. Indeed, nationalism not only increasingly characterizes these parties but also increasingly distinguishes them from other major party families, whose average positions over time are globalist. We argue that contemporary radical right parties are better conceptualized and described as neo-nationalist, a label consistent with both their social and economic positions.

The radical right succeeds when minorities challenge the societal standing of majorities. In Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), research often focuses on the political gains of ethnic minorities. We build on this work by differentiating among (1) types of representation; (2) minority mobilization versus ally advocacy; and (3) politically mobilized versus socially marginalized ethnic minorities. First, we introduce a novel measure of representation based on the power, influence, and prestige afforded to ethnic minorities at the executive (cabinet) level. Second, we evaluate whether legislative descriptive representation, ethnic minority party coalition participation, and ethnic minority cabinet-level prestige are associated with radical-right aggregate electoral success and individual-level radical-right vote choice. Cabinet-level prestige consistently predicts radical-right success; descriptive representation and coalition participation have less robust associations. Third, experiments in Romania and Slovakia highlight the mechanism, underscoring that representation – namely the substantive representation of politically mobilized minorities – causes resentment among ethnic majorities. In sum, majority-minority relations continue to structure CEE electoral politics, and the politicization of minority gains remains a viable strategy for mobilizing radical-right support.

Why are populist radical-right party activists intensely motivated to become involved in their party? These activists combine disaffection with politics, anxiety and the emotion dynamic known as ressentiment on the one hand, with high-intensity, low-reward political activism and a sense of long-term political efficacy on the other hand. This article contributes to a better understanding of the expressive, emotional and identity-based incentives behind party activism. It proposes a Spiral of Ressentiment model. In this model, individuals’ complex emotions of ressentiment are transformed into collective ressentiment through relationships within the party. The party relieves this ressentiment by providing a sense of belonging and hope for the future, but party messages and stigmatization then reignite ressentimentful feelings. This study uncovers the feedback loop through which populist radical-right parties both alleviate and encourage ressentiment emotions by analysing 50 in-depth interviews with Vlaams Belang local activists and party representatives.

Radical right behavior and support for radical right parties have increased across many countries in recent decades. A growing body of research has argued that, similar to the spread of other extremist behaviors, this is due to an erosion of political norms. This suggests that re-stigmatizing radical right parties might be an effective way of countering their growth. We use a survey experiment in Spain that compares the effectiveness of three theory-driven interventions aimed at increasing political stigma against a radical right party. Contrary to expectations, we fail to validate the efficacy of vignette-based attempts at stigmatization, instead identifying some backlash effects. Methodologically, our findings underscore the importance of validating treatments, as we show that simple attempts at re-stigmatization can produce null or opposing effects to their intended purpose. Theoretically, our results support the idea that normalization is a “one-way street,” in that re-stigmatizing parties is difficult after a party has become normalized.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on reactionary internationalism by linking it with scholarly discussions on civilisation and civilisationism, which have mostly been running in parallel trajectories. By doing so, it attempts to address the question of how the radical right, rooted in numerous particularisms, such as cultural, national, and religious, has managed to foster a global movement with an internationalist ideology that poses a significant challenge to the liberal international order. Through an analysis of the relevant literature and a case study of the Serbian radical right, this article tries to elucidate this question and bridge the gap between the two debates by demonstrating that civilisationism forms the core of reactionary internationalism, unifying the radical right from the West to the East. This article examines the Serbian case and its history of civilisational and geopolitical reactions as a possible paradigm for the contemporary radical right in general. Furthermore, it explores the role of Russian revisionism and war in Ukraine in shaping this civilisational discourse, specifically considering the narratives built around the Serbian foreign fighters’ network in Ukraine. An additional contribution of this article is that it provides a non-Western perspective on civilisation, religion, and nationalism.

Contemporary research on far-right politics has relied predominantly on the use of binaries between the ‘far/extreme/(populist) radical right’ and the so-called ‘mainstream’, and a ‘waves’ metaphor to historicise different eras of the post-World War Two far-right. In this article, we probe these categories and binaries, problematising hegemonic depictions, the consequent assumptions underpinning them, and what this means for resistance to reactionary politics. By reflecting on the current state of the field, summarising dominant approaches and their potential limitations, we arrive at our key contribution: a revised definition of the term ‘far right’ which shifts the focus away from categorisation towards an understanding of far-right politics as a political position. In turn, our approach also presents both a challenge to and evolution of the ‘waves’ metaphor which accounts for processes of mainstreaming and rests on a critical account of the mainstream itself. Our conceptualisation problematises traditional binaries while pointing to a ‘fifth wave’ of far-right politics in which the identities of the mainstream and far right are mutually constitutive. To illustrate our conceptual contribution, we conclude our article with a case study on the interaction between the far right and mainstream in UK politics.