We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing anti-system parties in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy. What mattered was not simply growth at the time of the election but cumulative growth performance. But the effect of the Depression on support for right-wing anti-system parties was not equally powerful under all economic, political and social circumstances. It was greatest in countries with relatively short histories of democracy, with existing extremist parties, and with electoral systems that created low hurdles to parliamentary representation. Above all, it was greatest where depressed economic conditions were allowed to persist.
We examine the impact of the Great Depression on the share of votes for right-wing anti-system parties in elections in the 1920s and 1930s. We confirm the existence of a link between political extremism and economic hard times as captured by growth or contraction of the economy. What mattered was not simply growth at the time of the election but cumulative growth performance. But the effect of the Depression on support for right-wing anti-system parties was not equally powerful under all economic, political and social circumstances. It was greatest in countries with relatively short histories of democracy, with existing extremist parties, and with electoral systems that created low hurdles to parliamentary representation. Above all, it was greatest where depressed economic conditions were allowed to persist.
In this article, we explore Norwegian Progress Party politicians' change of their rhetoric of immigration after the party for the first time became part of a coalition government in 2013. Equal to other right-wing populist parties in Europe, immigration has been the main reason for voters to support the Progress Party. How then does their immigration rhetoric change after entering office? This is important, as an intolerant immigration rhetoric has far-reaching consequences for the political climate in Europe. Right-wing populist parties can achieve much regarding migration policies merely because there is broad consensus on a strict migration policy today. However, to succeed remaining in office, they must remain being acceptable to other parties in the parliament and their coalition partner and therefore they need to moderate the way they go about communicating their message. Too much moderation however might lead to a split within the party, or losing core voters.
Policies to prevent radicalization and violent extremism (PRVE) frequently target a number of social movements seen as threats to national security. Often, this includes militant Islamist, right-wing and left-wing extremist milieus. In this article, we ask what distinguishes the ways in which local practitioners perceive and respond to these three milieus. Based on in-depth interviews with public servants in Sweden, we show how the milieus are seen to represent different types of threats, hold core values that resonate differently with dominant values in mainstream society and require responses that challenge public servants in diverging ways. Building on our analysis, we introduce a multidimensional model that clarifies why practitioners relate differently to each milieu. By including the rarely examined left-wing milieu, we are able to showcase the complexity of local PRVE work. Our study sheds new light on the challenges experienced by practitioners who are tasked to implement PRVE policy and demonstrates the problems of approaching "violent extremism" as a uniform phenomenon.
This article introduces the case of right-wing terrorism and violence in Putin's Russia into the purview of terrorism studies. The article explores the modus operandi of Russian right-wing militants by analyzing a new dataset, RTV-RUSSIA, which includes nearly 500 violent events covering the period 2000-2017. Compared to their Western European counterparts, Russian right-wing militants have operated more violently (with attacks being more frequent) as well as more purposefully (with a larger share of premeditated attacks). The article offers a historical and a comparative explanation. The first answers the question of why a wave of right-wing violence occurred in the 2000s, stressing the socio-economic turbulence of the 1990s, increasing immigration, ideological radicalization amid restrictive political opportunities and a permissive discursive environment, and the rise of the internet as an arena for spreading violent propaganda. The comparative explanation tackles the question of why Russia has seen so much more right-wing violence than Western countries, highlighting the combination of anocratic regime type, high violence levels, high immigration, and low social stigmatization of extreme-right views. ; Right-Wing Terrorism and Violence in Putin's Russia
Abstract A vast amount of social science research has been dedicated to the study of Islamist extremism – in particular, to uncover its psychological and structural drivers. However, the recent revival of extreme-right extremism points to the need to investigate this re-emerging phenomenon. This article highlights some of the characteristics of the extremisation of Islamism in Europe in parallel with the rise of the extremisation of right-wing extremist groups. In doing so, we explore similarities between Islamist and right-wing extremist individuals and groups. The main premise of the article is that a threat-regulation approach fails to understand the role of contextual and structural factors in the political and religious extremisation of individuals. Instead, the article claims that a reciprocal-threat model can better explain extremist violence since it is based on the idea that nativist and Islamist extremist individuals/groups are mutually threatening each other.
The discourse on right wing extremism and its origins entails some presumptions that have been reproduced for many years. Following these assumptions right wing extremism is a phenomenon of the margins which threatens the democratic centre of society. According to the discourse this democratic centre has nothing to do with right wing ideas. People who hold such ideas are constructed as individuals with problems or weaknesses and are thereby placed at the periphery as well. This specific view on right wing extremism and its protagonists influences the work of prevention too: especially the idea that young people with right wing ideas just need to be more educated on democratic principles shapes the contents of many prevention programs. Therefore young people should be trained in democratic thinking and supported to fulfill the developmental task of political socialization. Based on a biographical study with young right wing extremists this article discusses questions such as: Is right wing extremism a failed political socialization? And where is the connection between right wing extremism and society? ; Im Diskurs zum Rechtsextremismus und seinen Ursachen werden einige, scheinbar unerschütterliche Grundannahmen beständig reproduziert: Rechtsextremismus wird als ein bedrohliches aber auch marginales Phänomen verortet, welches mit der demokratischen Mitte der Gesellschaft wenig zu tun hat. Damit im Einklang werden Menschen mit rechtsextremen Überzeugungen ebenfalls an den Rand der Gesellschaft projiziert, die Ursachensuche verlässt selten die Ebene individualistischer Schuldzuweisungen. Diese Annahmen prägen auch die Ansätze zur Prävention von Rechtsextremismus: Insbesondere die Annahme, Rechtsextremist/innen seien hinsichtlich historischer oder politischer Zusammenhänge nicht gebildet oder aufgeklärt genug, liegt den Inhalten solcher Maßnahmen zu Grunde. Daher sollen Jugendliche die »richtige« Denkweise bezüglich gesellschaftlicher Strukturen, Zusammenhänge und Prozesse erlernen, um die Entwicklungsaufgabe der politischen Sozialisation erfolgreich bewältigen und gegenüber rechtsextremen Parolen widerständig sein zu können. Unter anderem auf der Basis von biografischen Interviews mit rechtsextremen Straftäter/innen wird in diesem Beitrag diskutiert, ob Rechtsextremist/innen wirklich nicht »richtig« denken können und was gesellschaftliches Denken eigentlich mit Rechtsextremismus zu tun hat.
Are all human beings of equal moral worth? If so, does this proposition generate moral obligations to others that transcend national and cultural boundaries? Cosmopolitans would answer yes to each of these questions, as would Pope Francis and Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Given our interconnected economic system, a global perspective on justice is not only pragmatic but also morally essential. In recent years, however, what had been an emerging consensus centered on a cosmopolitan view of the reciprocal responsibilities of nations has been stifled by a rising tide of nationalism and right-wing populism. As a right-wing populist leader of a major world power, President Trump stands in sharp, jarring contrast to the emergence of Pope Francis as one of the preeminent global moral leaders of our time. Pope Francis's leadership of the Roman Catholic Church has drawn new attention to the philosophical commitments of CST and to the longstanding position of Catholicism as a global faith, at a time when globalism and pluralism have become suspect. Pope Francis's theological and philosophical commitments embrace a cosmopolitan vision of the world's future in direct opposition to the secular nationalism offered by President Trump and other rising right-wing nationalists, such as Nigel Farrage in the United Kingdom and Marine Le Pen in France, who have both embraced President Trump's victory with enthusiasm.
This article reconstructs the concept of right-wing extremism/radicalism. Using Mudde's influential 1995 study as a foundation, it first canvasses the recent academic literature to explore how the concept has been described and defined. It suggests that, despite the frequent warnings that we lack an unequivocal definition of this concept, there is actually a high degree of consensus amongst the definitions put forward by different scholars. However, it argues that the characteristics mentioned in some of the definitions have not been organized meaningfully. It, therefore, moves on to distinguish between the defining properties of right-wing extremism/radicalism and the accompanying ones, and in so doing it advances a minimal definition of the concept as an ideology that encompasses authoritarianism, anti-democracy and exclusionary and/or holistic nationalism.
Right-wing movements in Latin America play a significant role in the region's political life. In this sense, they are not distinct from those analysed in Europe or the United States. Nonetheless, these movements have not generated anything like the level of analysis of their counterparts in those regions. They remain woefully understudied. This paper attempts to fill that void by analysing right-wing movements in one of the countries in the region. We use Brazil as a case study to discuss the rise of right-wing mobilization, particularly focussing on backlash to gender and LGBT rights, in Latin America. We do so by looking at how creating a moral panic around topics such as "family threat" set up anti-rights opportunities. We finish with a discussion on the impact of right wing movements for democracy in Brazil, in the region and beyond.
This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers' organizations that create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical theory informed by Paulo Freire's political pedagogy of popular education. Reading migrant day laborers' commentaries on their work experiences alongside critical accounts of today's general work culture, this "critical-popular" procedure yields a conception of precarity with two defining characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo's conception of "political literacy" and Bridget Anderson's notion of "migrantizing the citizen," in turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and multiracial appeal of Trumpism's white supremacist discourse of national economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro and Romand Coles. Day laborers' worker centers, I argue, refunction precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen. A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the worker center network were expanded throughout the economy.
It is a fact that in the European Union there is a strengthening of right-wing extremism, radical right movement, populism and nationalism. The consequences of the economic crisis, such as a decline in living standards, losing of jobs, rising unemployment especially among young people, undoubtedly goes in favor of strengthening the right-wing extremism. In the research, forms of manifestation will be covered of this dangerous phenomenon and response of the institutions. Western Balkan countries, as a result of right-wing extremism, are especially sensitive region on possible consequences that might occur, since there are several unresolved political problems, which can very easily turn into a new cycle of conflicts, if European integration processes get delayed indefinitely.
The following article main contribution falls within the domain of methodology as it draws attention on the strength of visual analysis within the field of study of populism. The work elaborates on a visual analy-sis of the posters published to advertise two events – a concert in memory of Jan Palash and the World Congress of Families – organized in Verona in the early months of 2019 by a set of organizations linked to the right and the extreme right and to conservative catholic stances. These politicized organizations carry out a specific type of cultural-political work and operate at the edge of the political sphere, by building alliances with (extreme) right-wing political actors and by lobbying political institutions. The visual analysis is geared at bringing agencies and ambivalences to the fore and allows to uncover (a) the 'communicative camouflage' of these organizations who spread radical right and catholic conservative messages, traditionally marked by highly recognizable communication features and symbols, in more neutral, moderate and positive forms; (b) the deployment of some populist elements in their communication strategy, such as the reference to welfare chauvinism, to the first Conte government as well as the identification of the 'natural family' as an homogenizing category associated with the good and moral side of society. While these features are per se not sufficient to define these organizations as fully populist actors, they are nonetheless important to underscore the role played by these organizations in spreading extremely polarized messages in a more digestible way for broader audiences by means of a communicative camouflage and of populist elements in their communication strategy.
The authors in the article reveal the positioning of extreme right political parties in the Western world and Central and Eastern Europe by following such ideological basis as nationalism and welfare chauvinism, practically rejecting immigrants and their willingness to use the benefits and services of the mentioned welfare systems in the presented Western as well as Central and Eastern European countries. The authors maintain their position, applying the secondary data from European Social Survey, International Monetary Fund and OECD data as well as interpretations of the authors from different foreign countries. In the end of the article the authors pose the one of the most interesting scientific and practical questions – why the place of the electorate of the "socially excluded" and having low income voters is moving from the left political parties to the side of the extreme right political parties? The further research is necessary in the following direction. This article is the first article of the theme on social chauvinism in Lithuania.
