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"Comparing cases in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland, Restrained Radicals explains the different approaches to local government taken by populist radical right parties, the extent of their radicalism and their impact from positions of power as they integrate into the democratic system"--

In this important and accessible study, Rafal Pankowski makes sense of the rapid growth of organized radical nationalism on the political level in Poland by showing its origins, its internal dynamics and the historical, political, social and cultural context that has made it possible. From political obscurity to the heart of mainstream politics, the recent rise of the extreme right in the Polish context surprised many observers. In the 1990s Poland was usually referred to as a country without significant extremist or populist movements. It was considered to be a stable, even i.

The populist radical right is one of the most studied political phenomena in the social sciences, counting hundreds of books and thousands of articles. This is the first reader to bring together the most seminal articles and book chapters on the contemporary populist radical right in western democracies. It has a broad regional and topical focus and includes work that has made an original theoretical contribution to the field, which make them less time-specific. --

AbstractAlthough the populist radical right (PRR) has become a global phenomenon, research about it focuses much more on Europe than on other regions. To counter this imbalance, this special issue provides comparative evidence on the discourse elaborated by the PRR on six non-European countries: Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, Turkey, and the United States. As we will show, non-European PRR forces articulate authoritarian, nativist, and populist ideas in different ways than their European brethren and they employ specific ideological elements (e.g., neoliberalism and religion) to advance discourses that resonate with the social grievances that are preponderant in the context wherein they operate. This reveals that part of the success of the PRR is related to its discursive flexibility and capacity to adapt itself with the aim of constructing frames that connect with the anxieties experimented by segments of the voting public across different national and regional settings.

In recent years more and more studies have pointed to the limitations of demand-side explanations of the electoral success of populist radical right parties. They argue that supply-side factors need to be included as well. While previous authors have made these claims on the basis of purely empirical arguments, this paper provides a (meta)theoretical argumentation for the importance of supply-side explanations. It takes issue with the dominant view on the populist radical right, which considers it to be alien to mainstream values in contemporary western democracies, expressed most explicitly in the "normal pathology thesis". Instead, it argues that the populist radical right should be seen as a radical interpretation of mainstream values, or, to stay in Scheuch and Klingemann's terminology, as a pathological normalcy. This argument is substantiated on the basis of an empirical analysis of party ideologies and mass attitudes. The proposed paradigmatic shift has profound consequences for the way the populist radical right and western democracy relate, as well as on how the populist radical right is best studied. Most importantly, it makes demand for populist radical right politics an assumption rather than a puzzle, and turns the prime focus of research on the political struggle over issue saliency and positions, and on the role of populist radical right parties within these struggles.

This article reviews three strands in the scholarship on the populist radical right (PRR). It covers both political parties and extra-parliamentary mobilization in contemporary European democracies. After definitional issues and case selection, the authors first discuss demand-side approaches to the fortunes of the PRR. Subsequently, supply-side approaches are assessed, namely political opportunity explanations and internal supply-side factors, referring to leadership, organization and ideological positioning. Third, research on the consequences of the emergence and rise of these parties and movements is examined: do they constitute a corrective or a threat to democracy? The authors discuss the growing literature on the impact on established parties' policies, the policies themselves, and citizens' behaviour. The review concludes with future directions for theorizing and research.