A Cultural Model of Radical Right Mobilization

• In Event: Mini-Conference on Politics in Post-industrial Societies V: Old and New Grievances and the Rising Appeal of Radical Parties

Abstract

The growing presence of radical-right parties and candidates across contemporary democracies over the past thirty years points to a still unsolved puzzle: why has the mainstreaming of exclusionary and authoritarian politics occurred at the present historical juncture and why has it been so widespread, despite the considerable baseline differences between the relevant country cases? To address these questions, I propose a theoretical model with three central features: (1) it differentiates between the constitutive components of radical-right politics—populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism—and places nationalism at the center of the explanatory framework; (2) it explicitly considers popular beliefs and elite political strategies, as well as their changing resonance; and (3) it simultaneously accounts for the specificity of country cases and overarching empirical regularities by identifying common causal mechanisms through which disparate conditions produce similar outcomes. In this paper, I will provide an overview of this theoretical framework, discuss its utility for explaining radical-right mobilization across Europe and the United States, and offer empirical evidence from my past work for the central mechanisms identified by this model.

Author

• Bart Bonikowski, New York University