Week 12
Mainstream Radicalization
and the Global Far Right

SOCI 229

Sakeef M. Karim
Amherst College


FAR RIGHT POPULISTS, TRUMPISM, AND THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS

Lecture I: November 18th

Reminders


Response Memo Deadline

Your eigth response memo—which has to be between 250-400 words and posted on our Moodle Discussion Board—is due by 8:00 PM on Wednesday.

Reminders

Final Paper Proposal


Final Paper Proposal Deadline

Your final paper proposals are due by 8:00 PM on Friday, November 22nd.

Reminders

Final Paper Proposal

Guidelines for the final paper proposal can be found here.

Reminders

Final Paper Proposal

To submit your final paper proposal, click here.

Reminders

Dr. Miloš Broćić will be joining us on December 11th.

Mainstream Radicalization

A Conceptual Model

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

Why do we need to theorize
the radicalization of mainstream parties?

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

Consider the times.

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

The far right entered a fourth wave in the twenty-first century, electorally and politically profiting from three “crises”: the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (and beyond), the Great Recession of 2008, and the “refugee crisis” of 2015. All the western democracies were affected, albeit in different ways, shaking the national and international political status quo, and giving rise to an unprecedented wave of Islamophobic and populist protest.

(Mudde 2019, 20, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

What characterizes the fourth wave, and differentiates it from the third wave, is the mainstreaming of the far right. While far-right politics was largely considered out of bounds for mainstream parties and politicians after 1945, with some notable exceptions … this is no longer the case today. In more and more countries, populist radical right parties and politicians are considered koalitionsfähig (acceptable for coalitions) by mainstream right, and sometimes even left, parties. Moreover, populist radical right (and even some extreme right) ideas are openly debated in mainstream circles, while populist radical right policies are adopted, albeit it generally in (slightly) more moderate form, by mainstream parties.

(Mudde 2019, 20–21, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

Another characteristic of the fourth wave is the heterogeneity of the far right, even within the subgroup of successful political parties. While the usual suspects still constitute the core - that is, the populist radical right parties that emerge from outside the political mainstream - they are complemented by a dizzying array of new far-right parties. The most important are transformed conservative parties, such as the Alliance of Young Democrats-Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz) and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland.

(Mudde 2019, 21, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

… or America’s Grand Old Party?

Why Theorize Mainstream Radicalization?

Karim and Lukk’s The Radicalization of Mainstream Parties in the 21st Century

Moving Beyond Nominalist Models of Party Politics

Far Right Typicality

Absent major political realignments, a party’s mainstream or radical bona fides are often treated as essential (i.e., time-invariant) traits that are set in stone—even as mainstream parties inch rightwards and radical parties anchor governing coalitions.

Far Right Typicality

Far Right Typicality

Nominalist treatments of party politics
are part of a deeper problem.

Far Right Typicality


[T]he categories social scientists use in our research belie the inherent fuzziness and vagueness of our most commonly used and important concepts. In many, if not most, cases, no particular feature is a common element in defining a concept. Rather, there are only family resemblances—criss-crossing patterns of similarities between different members.

(Monk 2022, 9, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Far Right Typicality

A Random (Yet Relevant) Question
How would you explain what a bird is?

Far Right Typicality

[C]onsider the immense heterogeneity of features possessed by members of the category “bird” … A prototypical bird, for instance, may be of a certain size (relatively small), have feathers and a beak, be able to fly and lay eggs, and so on. These features, in turn, are weighted in terms of importance to the prototype. Clusters of key categorical cues and the relations between these cues are known as prototypes—abstract summary representations of “best examples” of a concept … Flight, for instance, may be weighted more heavily than feathers. Even the relations between features may be weighted. Having feathers and a beak may be more important than a potential bird’s size and its ability to lay eggs. These features, the sets of properties we associate with a term, are called intensions and form the foundation of human thought.

(Monk 2022, 9, EMPHASIS ADDED)

Far Right Typicality

My contention: we can think of party politics through this lens, too—and focus on far right typicality in lieu of nominal
membership in the far right party family.

Far Right Typicality

A Question
How can this framework help us track or measure mainstream radicalization?

Far Right Typicality

There Are Other Benefits, Too

Karim and Lukk’s The Radicalization of Mainstream Parties in the 21st Century

Explaining Mainstream Radicalization in Europe

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

[S]everal scholars have turned their attention to the … question of the effect of radical right success on the behavior of other parties. The main focus in this line of research lies on the potentially ‘contagious’ effect of radical right parties, i.e. the question if their success causes other parties to adopt more anti-immigrant and culturally protectionist positions.

(Abou-Chadi and Krause 2020, 830, EMPHASIS ADDED)

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

If … (radical right) parties gain representation in parliament we observe a strong move towards an anti-immigrant stance by other political parties. These findings have important implications … First, they show that the radical right as an actor plays a fundamental role in the politicization of the immigration issue — they do not simply constitute a symptom of a larger development. Second, they demonstrate that the transformation of the political space in Western Europe … is not simply a reaction to shifting preferences of the European electorate, but is a result of the strategic interaction of political parties. Third, in relation to a more general literature on party competition they underline that parties do not only follow shifts on the demand side of the electoral market, but react to other parties’ behavior.

(Abou-Chadi and Krause 2020, 843–44, EMPHASIS ADDED)

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

To wit, far right parties are not simply outgrowths of sociocultural cleavages in greater society—they can create fault-lines themselves and restructure the topography of the political field (cf. Eidlin 2016).

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

How does the mainstream European right respond?

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

Amplifying Anti-Immigrant Discourse

Figure 3.7 from Abou-Chadi and Krause (2021).

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads


Although anti-immigrant shifts constitute a ‘double-edged sword’ for the mainstream right as they run into the danger of making the views of the far right socially acceptable … they tend to tighten policy proposals in order to remedy electoral losses to the radical right and win back vote switchers.

(Abou-Chadi and Krause 2021, 86, EMPHASIS ADDED)

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

A Question
Do you think this is an effective strategy?

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

[W]e investigate one of the core questions within the research on radical right success: Do accommodative strategies help to weaken RRPs electorally? Our analyses do not provide any evidence that adopting more anti-immigrant positions reduces the radical right’s support. Combining macro- and micro-level evidence, we can demonstrate that this does not mean that voters are generally unresponsive to party repositioning. To the contrary, accommodative policy shifts by mainstream parties tend to catalyze voter transfers between mainstream parties and RRPs. While some of these transitions cancel out in aggregation, the radical right, if anything, seems to be the net beneficiary of this exchange.

(Krause, Cohen, and Abou-Chadi 2023, 178, EMPHASIS ADDED)

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

Figure 1 from Krause, Cohen and Abou-Chadi (2023).

How Right-Wing Radicalism Spreads

Consider the Dutch Case

Group Exercise I

Radicalization in America?

Yes, I will once again assign you to groups.

Radicalization in America?

In your assigned group, discuss if you believe the Republican Party is radicalizing—and what that means in the American context.

In developing your argument(s), refer to Golder’s (2016) treatment of political opportunity structures, Mudde’s (2007) minimum and maximum definitions of the far right party family, and today’s discussion of far right typicality.

Once we reconvene, you will be expected to ask your classmates questions.

See You Wednesday

References

Note: Scroll to access the entire bibliography

Abou-Chadi, Tarik, and Werner Krause. 2020. “The Causal Effect of Radical Right Success on Mainstream Parties’ Policy Positions: A Regression Discontinuity Approach.” British Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 829–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123418000029.
———. 2021. “The Supply Side: Mainstream Right Party Policy Positions in a Changing Political Space in Western Europe.” In Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis, edited by Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Tim Bale, 67–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006866.004.
Eidlin, Barry. 2016. “Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? Political Articulation and the Canadian Comparison, 1932 to 1948.” American Sociological Review 81 (3): 488–516. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122416643758.
Golder, Matt. 2016. “Far Right Parties in Europe.” Annual Review of Political Science 19 (Volume 19, 2016): 477–97. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-042814-012441.
Krause, Werner, Denis Cohen, and Tarik Abou-Chadi. 2023. “Does Accommodation Work? Mainstream Party Strategies and the Success of Radical Right Parties.” Political Science Research and Methods 11 (1): 172–79. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8.
Monk, Ellis P. 2022. “Inequality Without Groups: Contemporary Theories of Categories, Intersectional Typicality, and the Disaggregation of Difference.” Sociological Theory 40 (1): 3–27. https://doi.org/10.1177/07352751221076863.
Mudde, Cas. 2007. Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511492037.
———. 2019. The Far Right Today. Cambridge, UK: Polity.