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Previous studies comparing ideological groups have been restricted to tests of between-group differences in the means of relevant political psychological variables, thereby neglecting group differences in the variances, meanings and nomological networks of the tested variables. A first exploratory study used data from the European Social Survey (N=7,314) comparing groups of political party members on the basis of their scores on a self-placement left-right scale. The second study (N=69) constituted an in-depth test for the presence of differences between samples of political activists of moderate parties, communists, anarchists and right-wing extremists. The results revealed that there is a fair amount of heterogeneity within left-wing and right-wing extremists, indicating a substantial amount of within-group variance of social attitudes, values and prejudice. Moreover, the extremist ideologies are best approached as distinct ideologies that cannot be reduced to extreme versions of moderate ideology, and differences in the meanings and nomological networks of the various extremist ideologies were also obtained. It is erroneous to consider members of extremist groups as being "all alike". The findings obtained from samples of political moderates are not a particularly solid basis for theories about extremism. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractPrevious studies comparing ideological groups have been restricted to tests of between‐group differences in the means of relevant political psychological variables, thereby neglecting group differences in the variances, meanings and nomological networks of the tested variables. A first exploratory study used data from the European Social Survey (N = 7,314) comparing groups of political party members on the basis of their scores on a self‐placement left–right scale. The second study (N = 69) constituted an in‐depth test for the presence of differences between samples of political activists of moderate parties, communists, anarchists and right‐wing extremists. The results revealed that there is a fair amount of heterogeneity within left‐wing and right‐wing extremists, indicating a substantial amount of within‐group variance of social attitudes, values and prejudice. Moreover, the extremist ideologies are best approached as distinct ideologies that cannot be reduced to extreme versions of moderate ideology, and differences in the meanings and nomological networks of the various extremist ideologies were also obtained. It is erroneous to consider members of extremist groups as being 'all alike'. The findings obtained from samples of political moderates are not a particularly solid basis for theories about extremism.

To explain statistically significant variation in electoral support for right-wing extremist parties during three Dutch parliamentary elections in 1994, developments within the parties & the (negative) media publicity they generated are reviewed. However, these factors explain only a small portion of the variation; an alternative explanation based on protest voting & the theory of first- & second-order elections accounts for a much greater portion. Overall, the evidence indicates that the long-feared new era of strong electoral growth of right-wing extremism in the Netherlands is not forthcoming, particularly since support for the Center Democrats waned in less than 4 months. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 23 References. Adapted from the source document.

In 1994 three elections were held in the Netherlands. For a time it seemed that the right-wing extremist parties were destined to break out of their marginal position. However, after these three elections, in terms of electoral support they ended up where they had started. The variation in electoral support for these parties can only in part be attributed to developments within the parties and the (negative) publicity these developments incited in the media. An alternative explanation based upon protest voting and the theory of first and second-order elections appears more promising.

The resurgence of Right-Wing Extremism (RWE) has become a cause for concern in Western countries during the 21st century. An increase in white nationalist sentiment in recent years has provided impetus to understand the contemporary drivers of far-right ideology. This study examines in-group and out-group debates on Stormfront.org, which is the largest and oldest online community dedicated to white nationalism and extreme right-wing political views. It used a dataset of approximately 1m posts collected from the open Opposing Views forum on Stormfront from the period 2001 to 2020 to create a corpus of over 195m words for thematic analysis. A Natural Language Processing (NLP) model was used to analyze the corpus, and a supervised phrase mining algorithm was used to identify key topics in the debate. The study finds that key issues being debated between in-group and out-group members of the Stormfront online community relate to perceptions of white identity, African American identity, racial issues, conservative political issues, and the history and politics of the United States. These findings highlight the issues of mutual importance to in-group and out-group members and identify opportunities for further research into the ideology of online RWE communities.