Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe

Manuela Caiani, Ondřej Císař, Manuela Caiani, Ondřej Císař

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351342797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides state of the art research by leading experts on the movement parties of the radical right. It examines the theoretical implications and empirical relevance of these organizations, comparing movement parties in time and space in Europe and beyond.

The editors provide a theoretical introduction to radical right movement parties, discussing analytical frameworks for interpreting their causes, forms, and effects. In the subsequent sections of the book, chapter authors examine a range of empirical case studies in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches, and make a significant contribution to the literature on social movements and party politics.

This book is essential reading for scholars of European party politics and students in European politics, social movements, comparative politics, and political sociology.

PART I

Theory

1

Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe

An introduction¹

Manuela Caiani and Ondřej Císař

This volume, exploring various radical right organizations in twelve European countries, presents the first comparative study of Radical Right Movement Parties in Europe. Based on a common analytical framework, chapters offer a highly differentiated view of how radical right politics develops across Europe through the interplay between radical right political parties and movements.

Movement parties, as a new type of political organization, have proved successful in mobilizing voters in many countries (Kitchelt 2006). Thus far, however, the academic focus has been mostly on left-wing movement parties and ideologically hybrid organizations, such as those that emerged in Southern Europe during the Eurozone crisis (for example Syriza, Podemos, and the Five Star Movement; della Porta et al. 2017). The radical right has as yet remained outside the focus of this research (although we list some exceptions below). Nevertheless, the radical right – in its populist and extreme variants – is one of the most researched objects in the social sciences (for example Mudde 2007; Caiani et al. 2012; Caiani 2017b), and seems to share features with other movement parties. In fact, some of these organizations have been seen to straddle the conceptual space between party and movement (Gunther and Diamond 2003) in that they contest elections in order to gain representation in office, yet seek to mobilize public support by framing contentious issues in particular ways (Minkenberg 2002). Whilst some attempts have been made to bridge the party political literature and social movement studies (for example Minkenberg 2003; McAdam and Tarrow 2010), the two branches of scholarship have only rarely crossed paths in analyses of the radical right (recently there have been new contributions such as papers in a forthcoming special issue of European Societies, see Gattinara and Pirro 2018; Minkenberg 2018).

In an attempt to bridge social movement and party politics studies within a wider concern with democratic theories, della Porta et al. (2017) present both new empirical evidence on left-wing political organizations such as Syriza and Podemos that emerged after the 2008 crisis, and conceptual insights into these topical socio-political phenomena within a cross-national comparative perspective. Although their book is a ground-breaking work on movement parties, it does not focus on the radical right, nor does it include Eastern European cases. Similarly, in a recent work Hutter (2014) demonstrates the usefulness of studying both electoral and protest politics to better understand the impact of globalization on political mobilization, including the radical right. He particularly emphasizes how cleavage politics can be helpful to understanding the formation of new social movements and populist parties in Western Europe, but he relies only on quantitative evidence and does not include Eastern Europe either. Examining the collapse of the post-9/11 anti-war movement against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Heaney and Rojas (2015) focus on activism and protest in the United States. They show that how people identify with social movements and political parties matters a great deal, and they consider the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street cases for comparison. Theirs is an important book, but it includes only US movements.

As for right-wing groups, while the new right-wing populist parties’ mobilization of the ‘losers’ in the processes of globalization is seen to be the driving force behind the restructuring of West European politics, some scholars have recently gone beyond party politics (for example see Kriesi et al. 2012) to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups, and social movement organizations, and how these various actors frame the new conflicts. However, these scholars do not pay specific attention to movement parties. Finally, Minkenberg (2015, 2017) focuses on the radical right’s interaction in many Eastern European countries with other political actors, such as parties, governments, and interest groups, and underlines the effects of such interaction with regard to agenda-setting and policies in ‘loaded’ policy fields, namely minorities and immigration, law and order, religion, territorial issues, and democratization. However, he does not focus on movement parties and he does not include Western European cases.

In this book we aim at shedding light on this new object of investigation in the social sciences, by asking the following questions: what are the main features of movement parties on the radical right? What organizational and strategic features qualify these networks of organizations as movement parties rather than party movements? What is the lifecycle of movement parties, in terms of their emergence and breakthrough, the structuring of movement party relations, and the construction of shared collective identities?

Movement parties appear to be of particular scholarly (and social) relevance today in a ‘Europe in crisis mode’ (i.e. the euro debt/financial crisis, the migration crisis, the Greek crisis, the Ukraine crisis, the migrant crisis, Brexit, etc.) which has seen only moderate policy response from the political mainstream. Politics is indeed about the conflict between political interests and issues which are advocated by parties, social movements, and citizens’ groups. The literature on political parties has conceptualized this terrain of contested political issues as a country’s political interaction space. While the party literature has used this model to understand interactions among political parties and explain the mobilization of the radical right, we suggest extending this idea to include not only political parties, but also protest politics and social movements. Throughout the world, we can see street mobilizations turning into new political parties (such as Jobbik) and vice versa, i.e. established political figures spawning political mobilizations (Tea Party movement, Fidesz).

This volume focuses on one segment of these mobilizations that, alongside previous crises, has been gaining momentum against the backdrop of the current migrant crisis and that is the interactions of radical right parties and movements. As such, the volume seeks to bridge two types of literature – that on radical right parties and that on social movements. Social movement studies have tended to declare social movements the defining feature of established post-1968 democracies and have generally prioritized the protest arena of action. However, without taking political parties into account, it is hardly possible to make sense of radical right mobilization in most post-industrial countries. This type of interaction between movements and parties constitutes one of the most important challenges for the social sciences. At present, their interaction remains under-theorized. Therefore, this book investigates one of the most debated theoretical and empirical problems we face. It is hoped that it will also stimulate conversations across various research areas by bringing together scholars working on social movements and political parties.

Focusing on the interactions between electoral and protest politics seems especially important for studying the segments of the population that tend to express their grievances not through street protest, but through the protest vote, which is more common among people siding with the radical right than it is among movements on the political left (Hutter 2014). While the relationship between the electoral and protest arenas is one of reinforcement in the case of the left, on the political right, a substitutive effect seems to be at work. However, there are cases that exhibit a different pattern (see especially Chapters 8 and 9 on Germany and Sweden in this volume). There are examples where the electoral mobilization of the radical right was not accompanied by a decrease in political protest action. Although we lack a rigorous approach to explain this puzzle in the present volume, it seems that there are certain additional conditions that must be met in order for the substitutive effect to take place (see the concluding Chapter 15 in this volume).

Given that European societies are currently facing multiple challenges, such as the recent economic recession in some parts of the continent, the rise in political populism, and xenophobic mobilization against diverse ‘others’, this type of research that focuses not only on protest, but also on its electoral consequences is about to become even more important. This has been made all the more true by the European ‘migrant crisis’, which has clear potential to politically reconfigure not only the European political arena, but also national politics in many member states. In this respect, this volume focuses on a problem of a great relevance, seeking to engender a novel stream of research on the movement parties of the radical right addressing these issues. It examines the theoretical implications and ­empirical relevance of these organizations, comparing movement parties in time and space, drawing on empirical cases investigated with different methods, and trying to bridge the social movement and party politics literature.

The first aim of this book is therefore to fill the empirical gap that at present exists in the discussions of these dimensions of politics and political interactions, by providing a detailed map of emergent tendencies towards the formation of movement parties among European right-wing organizations. Focusing on Eastern as well as Western Europe, the volume offers a very wide perspective on the subject.

Moreover, although the volume’s concern is with radical right organizations, its findings can be read in comparison to findings on other types of radicalism (e.g. religious radicalism) and the role of movement mobilization in them, offering in this way a valuable insight into one of the most recent and promising fields of investigation within extremism and radicalism research (i.e. the interactions of parties and movements).

Second, besides its descriptive side, this book offers a systematic study of different types of movement parties in different countries and is thereby able to reveal – and possibly explain – differences in the intensity, and especially in the forms of party movement interactions, while also offering reflections on developments, convergences, and divergences in these interactions. This is of crucial interest for the scientific discussion and literature on these political dimensions.

The volume makes a significant contribution to the research on radical right ‘movement party organizations’ in three ways: theoretically, by showing the importance of underexplored topics in the study of the radical right; methodologically, by expanding the scientific boundaries of this research field through an interdisciplinary approach and new methods of analysis; and empirically, by providing new evidence about radical right movement party organizations from Western, Eastern, and Central Europe. The book is divided into three sections. After discussing, in this introduction (Caiani and Císař), the new conceptual category of the movement party and its applicability to the radical right (underlining differences and similarities with left-wing organizations), this book reviews the scholarship on radical right parties and movements in Europe. It focuses on three strands of this extensive literature (for an overview, see Caiani 2017): first, the political opportunity explanations for the fortunes of these parties and movements; second, internal supply-side approaches, referring to internal organizati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• List of abbreviations
• PART I Theory
• PART II Western Europe
• PART III Central and Eastern Europe
• Index