Radical Right

Political Capital is a Budapest-based, independent political research and consultancy institute with a decade of experience, a strong international network and reputation. The basic values of the institute are parliamentary democracy and market economy. The institute's main fields of interest are political radicalism, extremism and its social background, conspiracy theories, prejudices, election research and Russian political influence within the EU. Political Capital has strong expertise in quantitative analyses.

Thanks largely to the Kremlin’s information war, Ukraine’s ultranationalists have become global media stars of a sort, depicted in Western and other reports as key players in Ukraine’s third major political upheaval in less than a quarter-century. How do we explain the paradox of ultranationalist parties becoming involved in a protest movement whose thrust is toward greater integration between Ukraine and the European Union? And are the fears that swirl around these parties justified?

White Aryan Resistance (WAR) and the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) are two American-based white-supremacist or neo-fascist groupuscules whose respective leaders, Tom Metzger and Matt Hale, were quick to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular. This analysis, first, locates both WAR and the WCOTC in the context of the fascist style of radical politics in the West by emphasizing the role of vanguards in promoting disorder and violence to achieve a New Order. It then briefly examines the role of small, violent groups in general before the advent of modern forms of mass communication. Having established the background, the authors proceed to an account of WAR and the WCOTC as groupuscules apart from their roles on the Internet, and then to detailed descriptions of their websites and how visitors can explore them. The analysis concludes by asserting that the Internet does provide these groupuscules certain opportunities to reach audiences they might not have reached in the past, but that the threat they pose may be exaggerated.

In diesem Band werden in vier soziologischen Fallstudien begünstigende Faktoren identifiziert, welche lokale Gemeinschaften anfällig oder widerstandsfähig machen gegenüber Erscheinungsformen des Rechtsextremismus. Der Vergleich der Fallbeispiele offenbart, wie der Rechtsextremismus vor Ort funktioniert, wie man ihn erkennt und wissenschaftlich erhebt, was ihn befördert, wie er sich verändert und wie ihm beizukommen ist. Die Autoren stellen Befunde der empirischen Untersuchung anschaulich dar und leiten daraus praxisnahe Handlungsempfehlungen für Politik, Öffentlichkeit und Wissenschaft ab. Dabei werben die Soziologen für eine neue Allianz zwischen Forschenden und Zivilgesellschaft.

A B S T R A C T Using a new regional database of national and European parliament elections on NUTS 2 level in 28 countries, we test the main theories explaining the electoral support for the European far right. Accounting for differences between the extremist (ER) and populist radical right (PRR), we find evidence in support of both economic insecurity and cultural backlash theses. The ER vote is associated mostly with economic insecurity and the PRR vote mostly with cultural backlash. Whereas micro and macro-level analyses have often produced conflicting results, unemployment, immigration and income inequalities have significant and robust effects at the meso level, indicating that the factors determining the far right vote might at large be operating at a sub-national level. In line with the " contact " and " salience-of-change " hypotheses, the effects of economic insecurity are more pronounced in regions that undergo sudden changes compared to those with high levels of immigration.

This paper discusses the growth of the populist radical right as a concrete example of the scenario where liberal democratic ideas are losing support in broadly liberal democratic societies. Our goal is to enrich John Rawls’s influential theory of political liberalism. We argue that even in that underexplored scenario, Rawlsian political liberalism can offer an appealing account of how to promote the legitimacy and stability of liberal democratic institutions provided it places partisanship centre-stage. Specifically, we propose a brand-new moral duty binding ‘reasonable’ partisans committed to pluralism. This duty establishes conditions where partisans must strategically transform society’s public reason (i.e., transform the visions for society their parties campaign on) in ways that promise to attract back support from illiberal and antidemocratic competitors. While this strategic behaviour might seem impermissible, we show that Rawls’s distinctive account of sincerity in democratic deliberation is uniquely placed to justify it as perfectly ethical.

The inside story of the rise of Ukip
A must-read book for all those interested in Ukip's quest to redraw the map of British politics
Based on unprecedented access to the party and its key players - including Nigel Farage, Douglas Carswell, and Mark Reckless
Includes behind the scenes observations from the campaign trail and more than one hundred interviews
Reveals what really happened during the 2015 general election campaign - and in the defections and by-elections which preceded it
Makes extensive use of British Election Study data from over five decades to answer important questions about what the rise of Ukip tells us about the changing political landscape of modern Britain
The UK Independence Party (Ukip) is the most significant new force in British politics for a generation. Under the leadership of Nigel Farage, the party has enjoyed a remarkable rise, winning the 2014 European Parliament elections as well as two parliamentary by-elections, and attracting mainstream defectors to achieve major party status. By the time of the 2015 general election, Farage and Ukip stood on the threshold of becoming a major force at Westminster.

This account is a must-read for anyone interested in the inside story of Ukip's quest to change British politics during one of the most unpredictable and dramatic elections in recent history. Based on unprecedented access to the party and its key players, the book pulls back the curtain on one of the most intriguing campaigns in living memory. It includes behind the scenes observations from the campaign trail and more than one hundred interviews - with leading Ukip insiders such as Nigel Farage, Douglas Carswell, and Mark Reckless, as well as major donors, strategists, and figures from across the political landscape as they grappled with Ukip's rise.

Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo reveal what really happened during the 2015 election campaign and in the by-elections and defections which preceded it, providing detailed accounts of the critical moments that shaped both the election itself and British politics more widely. The book also makes extensive use of British Election Study data from over five decades to answer important questions about the rise of Ukip and what it signifies. Who voted for Ukip and why? How are political loyalties in Britain changing over time? What are the deeper currents that have made Ukip's rise possible and will continue to shape its future? And what does the party's campaign for power reveal about the current evolution of British politics and society?

UKIP takes readers inside the campaign, telling for the first time the exciting inside story of a new party attempting to redraw the map of British politics.
Readership: All those interested in contemporary British politics - and what the immediate future holds for the United Kingdom

Drawing on the European Electoral Study (EES) for the 2014
European Parliamentary elections, we analyse the electoral
competition between left wing populist parties and their nonpopulist
counterparts in the nine European countries where this
type of competition has occurred. By using the EES, we hold
constant the electoral level and the electoral system, the timing of
the elections and the question wording. To our knowledge, this is
one of the broadest comparative analyses of European left-wing
populist parties so far. The focus on the competition between
leftist parties draws attention to the key question of the
vulnerabilities of the non-populist left vis à vis their populist
competitors. We test a battery of bivariate clustered logistic
models and find that the losers of globalization theories help
account for left wing populist parties’ support. However, the
sociodemographic profile of these supporters does not fit the
mainstream view on who these losers are. Moreover, we obtain
strong support for the globalization cleavage theories: citizens who
hold critical attitudes towards the EU and who perceive
immigration as a threat to their ‘way of life’ are more prone to
support left wing populist parties than non-populist left parties.
These findings apply both to the entire sample of countries and
to each one of them individually.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in European Politics and Society on 05 Jun 2018:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23745118.2018.1482848