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Radical Right (radical + right)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

How (not) to operationalise subnational political opportunity structures: A critique of Kestilä and Söderlund's study of regional elections

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2009
KAI ARZHEIMER
Based on an aggregate analysis of the French regional elections of 2004, Kestilä and Söderlund, in their 2007 article, ,Subnational Political Opportunity Structures and the Success of the Radical Right: Evidence from the March 2004 Regional Elections in France', examine the impact of subnational political opportunity structures on the success of the radical right and argue that such an approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross-national analyses. The present article disputes this claim on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrates that their empirical findings are spurious. [source]

The Renewal of the Radical Right: Between Modernity and Anti-modernity

GOVERNMENT AND OPPOSITION, Issue 2 2000
Michael Minkenberg
[source]

Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market.

NATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 4 2006
Reviewed by Amir Abedi
[source]

How (not) to operationalise subnational political opportunity structures: A critique of Kestilä and Söderlund's study of regional elections

Immigration sceptics, xenophobes or racists?

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2008
Radical right-wing voting in six West European countries
Given how central the immigration issue has been for the new radical right-wing parties in Western Europe, many have turned to immigration-related factors in trying to explain their emergence and electoral mobilisation. This research has convincingly shown that immigration scepticism (i.e., wanting to reduce immigration) is among the principal factors for predicting who will vote for a radical right-wing party. However, earlier studies have often uncritically equated immigration scepticism with xenophobia or even racism. By using data from the first round of the European Social Survey (2003) involving six West European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway), this article differentiates between immigration scepticism and xenophobic attitudes. The analyses strongly indicate that xenophobic attitudes are a far less significant factor than immigration scepticism for predicting who will vote for the new radical right. Moreover, this article analyses the extent to which anti-immigration frames employed by radical right-wing parties resonate with attitudes held by supporting voters, and to what extent they make a difference for people's decision to vote for the radical right. The analyses indicate that frames linking immigration to criminality and social unrest are particularly effective for mobilising voter support for the radical right. Finally, the article criticises earlier research that explained radical right-wing voting with reference to ethnic competition theory. In contrast to much of the earlier research that used macro-level measures and comparisons, this study uses (self-reported) individual-level data on the degree of ethnic heterogeneity of people's area of residence. Hypotheses derived from ethnic competition theory receive less support than expected, which indicates that earlier research may have overestimated the significance of these factors. [source]

Subnational political opportunity structures and the success of the radical right: Evidence from the March 2004 regional elections in France

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2007
ELINA KESTILÄ
The concept of ,political opportunity structure' refers to the degree of openness of a particular political system and the external institutional or socio-economic constraints and opportunities that it sets for political parties. Comparative analysis across subnational units is conducted where the 94 departments of mainland France are the units of analysis. The significance of electoral institutions (district magnitude), party competition (effective number of parties), electoral behaviour (turnout) and socioeconomic conditions (immigration and unemployment) on the ability of the FN to gather votes across the departments is assessed by means of multiple regression. The empirical results show that the subnational political opportunity structures have been of great importance for the FN. Some four out of the five independent variables are statistically significant and explain a great deal of the variance in the two dependent variables (electoral support for FN list and index of electoral success). Turnout and district magnitude are negatively correlated with the electoral fortunes of the FN, while unemployment and the effective number of party lists are positively correlated with the success of the FN in the regional elections. The variable that indicates the share of non-European immigrants does not provide additional explanatory power in a statistically significant way. [source]

Nazis and Workers before 1933

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 1 2002
Dick Geary
This paper examines the mass of recent research, which suggests that the Nazis were much more successful in winning "working-class" votes than had been previously imagined. Though the research has undeniably shown a great deal of such support, some of the claims made on its basis (e.g. about the cross-sectional and relatively random distribution of Nazi support amongst workers) are not sustainable. In fact working-class Nazis were much more likely to be found amongst some communities than others (e.g. in rural areas and small provincial towns); and the fact that some Social Democrats did desert to the radical right in the early 1930s is not sufficient to claim that explanations framed in terms of "class milieux" no longer function. [source]