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Investigates the purported crisis of parties in Western democracies, drawing on the empirical literature. While a decline of parties generally is detected in terms of organization, appeal, & strength, data on this decline are sketchy at best. More data indicate that it is not parties per se that are in decline, but the ability of parties to express the popular will. New parties associated with new social movements & the extreme Right have arisen to fill the vacuum left by the inability of traditional parties to perform this expressive function. Moreover, the outcome of this decline in party expressivity has been different depending on the context. In some countries, it has produced more self-affirmation for the new politics of social movements; in others it has produced more atomization & alienation & a corresponding popularity of far Right parties. In both cases, the decline of traditional party expressivity is directly linked to the rise of the new parties of Left-liberalism & neoconservatism. 65 References. D. M. Smith

This paper shows the long and prestigious intellectual tradition of anti-party arguments. Even before political parties emerged as unitary political actors, there were already well-developed arguments with which to express hostility towards them. The emphasis on unity and harmony in Western civilization moulded political thought. While this cultural framework was broken in the brief but extraordinarily powerful experience of the Medieval Italian Republican Cities, the acceptance of organized dissent failed to emerge. Instead, this experience left the vivid memory of the danger of factionalism. In eighteenth century France, both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries viewed parties as political maladies, and nineteenth century liberalism produced only a diffident defence of parties. At the end of the nineteenth century, hostility towards parties was nurtured in both Germany and France by elevating the ideals of the State and of the Nation. Italian and German fascists drew on and developed these philosophical antiparty traditions in the 1920s and 1930s. Since 1945, however, few anti-party parties have developed their own detailed or comprehensive philosophical critiques of parties; the Italian MSI is a notable exception. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)

In allen westeuropäischen Demokratien können die rechtsextremen Parteien bei Wahlen Stimmzuwächse verzeichnen. Anhand mehrerer Kriterien werden die rechtsextremen Parteien in Westeuropa in zwei unterschiedliche Typen unterteilt. Danach ist der kleinere Teil der rechtsextremen Parteien sowohl ideologisch als auch vom Auftreten her faschistisch geprägt, wobei bei dieser Gruppe die Wählerstimmen stagnieren bzw. leicht rückläufig sind. Der größere Teil dieser Parteien weist Merkmale eines neuen Typs von Rechtsparteien auf, Beispiel dafür sind u.a. die deutschen Republikaner oder die französische Front National. Ideologische und das Verhalten betreffende Unterscheidungsmerkmale werden erörtert. (AuD-Pls)