Varieties of Radicalism: Examining the Diversity of Radical Left Parties and Voters in Western Europe

Radical left parties (RLPs) are diverse and several RLP subtypes have been distinguished in the literature. However, the degree to which these subtypes are linked to significantly different policy proposals has not been analysed, and little is known about whether subtypes are associated with differences in their respective voters’ characteristics. This article analyses the policy positions of RLPs across a number of issues, using manifesto and expert survey data, allowing insights into the differentiation between types of RLPs. RLPs differ in the extent to which they adopt New Politics issues, and the article proposes a classification of Traditional and New Left RLPs. Using cross-national survey data from the European Election Studies series and multilevel multinomial models, the article examines the ideological, policy and social differences in the electorates of the various types of RLPs. It finds socio-demographic and attitudinal differences between the voters of Traditional and New Left RLPs that are consistent with the programmatic differences of the parties.     

Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an American Water Tragedy

The lead poisoning of Flint, Michigan’s water is popularly framed as a case of “environmental racism” given that Flint’s population is mostly black and lower income. In this essay I argue that we see the environmental racism that underlies Flint’s water poisoning not as incidental to our political-economic order, nor even as stemming from racist intent, but as inseparable from liberalism, an organizing logic we take for granted in our modern age. I expand on the idea of “racial liberalism” here. While upholding the promise of individual freedoms and equality for all, racial liberalism—particularly as it was translated into urban renewal and property making in mid-20th-century urban America—drove dispossession. In Flint racialized property dispossession has been one major factor underlying the city’s financial duress, abandonment, and poisoned infrastructure. Yet, through austerity discourse, Flint is disciplined as if it were a financially reckless individual while the structural and historical causes of its duress are masked. Tracing the history of property making and taking in Flint and the effects of austerity urbanism on its water infrastructure, my central argument is that our understanding of Flint’s predicament—the disproportionate poisoning of young African-Americans—can be deepened if we read it as a case of racial liberalism’s illiberal legacies.     

Different Types of Right-Wing Populist Discourse in Government and Opposition: The Case of Italy

Does right-wing populist discourse change when parties move from opposition to government? How do different ideological types of right-wing populist parties express this discourse? Through an analysis of the Lega Nord and Forza Italia/Popolo della Libertà between 2006 and 2013, we find that while the switch to office does bring some changes, the main elements of their populist discourse remain largely the same. We also show how their respective emphases on ‘elites’ and ‘others’ distinguish the parties: FI/PDL focuses overwhelmingly on ‘elites’ while the LN places similar emphasis on both ‘elites’ and ‘others’.     

Support for radical left ideologies in Europe

This article examines support for radical left ideologies in 32 European countries. It thus extends the relatively scant empirical research available in this field. The hypotheses tested are derived mainly from group‐interest theory. Data are deployed from the 2002–2010 European Social Surveys (N = 174,868), supplemented by characteristics at the country level. The results show that, also in the new millennium, unemployed people and those with a lower income are more likely to support a radical left ideology. This is only partly explained by their stronger opinion that governments should take measures to reduce income differences. In contrast to expectations, the findings show that greater income inequality within a country is associated with reduced likelihood of an individual supporting a radical left ideology. Furthermore, cross‐national differences in the likelihood of supporting the radical left are strongly associated with whether a country has a legacy of an authoritarian regime.     

Appropriated Martyrs: The Branch Davidians and the Radical Right

After the disastrous end of the Waco standoff in 1993, the Branch Davidian dead were idealized as martyrs by many on the radical right, despite the incompatibility between Davidian doctrine and right-wing ideology. This appropriation suggests the importance of martyrologists in identifying martyrs, as well as the increasing malleability of the concept of martyrdom. For martyrdom, as it appears in the right-wing treatment of the Waco affair, departs significantly from classical definitions of what constitutes a martyr.     

Leaderless Resistance and Ideological Inclusion: The Case of the Earth Liberation Front

Leaderless resistance is a strategy of opposition that allows for and encourages individuals or small cells to engage in acts of political violence entirely independent of any hierarchy of leadership or network of support. This article examines the development of the leaderless resistance strategy by the radical right and more recently by the radical environmentalist movement. While both movements use leaderless resistance to avoid detection, infiltration, and prosecution by the state, environmental groups like the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) benefit additionally because of the ideological inclusiveness that leaderless resistance fosters. Historically, ideological cleavages have rendered radical environmental groups such as Earth First! less effective than they would have been otherwise. Using leaderless resistance, however, the ELF eliminates all ideology extraneous to the specific cause of halting the degradation of nature. This elimination enables the ELF to mobilize a greater number of “direct actions.”     

Three decades of populist radical right parties in Western Europe: So what?

The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so‐called ‘verrechtsing’ (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition and failure in government. In fact, there are at least three reasons why PRRPs might increase their impact in the near future: the tabloidisation of political discourse; the aftermath of the economic crisis; and the learning curve of PRRPs. Even in the unlikely event that PRRPs will become major players in West European politics, it is unlikely that this will lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system. PRRPs are not a normal pathology of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalisation of mainstream values.     

Transtexuality and the Precarious Materials of Dissent (1973): Radicalism in Cecilia Vicuña,Felipe Ehrenberg and the Beau Geste Press (1970–1976)

The article analyses the material strategies of dissent through two transtextual bookworks, Cecilia Vicuña's Sabor a mi (Vicuña, 1973) and Felipe Ehrenberg's Pussywillow (1973) produced at the Beau Geste Press radical collective. Contesting Pinochet's coup in Chile, they resorted to visibly undisciplined responses to ‘the New Disorder now in power’. Experimenting with embodied poetics based on the page as a site of resistance, on textual construction predicated on relational impetus, they exploited litter and impoverished materials. Heterodox aesthetics at the BGP personified equivocal gender imagery. Word objects and body contours transmogrified to bring to the surface the interpenetrated textures of perception, identity and language.     

The Welfare Agenda of the Populist Radical Right in Western Europe: Combining Welfare Chauvinism,Producerism and Populism*

Recent scholarship on the populist radical right tends to imprecisely describe the welfare agenda of this party family with reference to its key ideological characteristics of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. We propose an alternative analytical framework that considers the multidimensionality of welfare state positions and the “deservingness criteria” that underlie ideas about welfare entitlement. Applying this framework to a sample of four European populist radical right parties, we conclude that three interrelated frames inform their welfare agenda. These parties, we argue, advocate social closure not only on the basis of the deservingness criterion of identity (welfare chauvinism), but also on criteria of control, attitude, and reciprocity (welfare producerism) and on an antagonism between the people and the establishment (welfare populism). Understanding the welfare agenda of the populist radical right requires us to move beyond welfare chauvinism and to reconsider the concept of welfare producerism and its interaction with welfare chauvinism.     

Leader Effects and Voting for the Populist Radical Right in Western Europe

Charismatic leaders are often assumed to drive the electoral success of populist radical right parties. Yet, little attention is given to how voter evaluations of leaders influence individual voting behavior. To our knowledge, no systematic and comparative tests of this empirical question exist. In this paper, we test to what extent voters’ support for populist radical right parties is fueled by leaders' appreciation. In order to examine leader effects on the populist radical right vote, we rely on an original dataset pooling 29 National Election Studies from ten established West European parliamentary democracies (1985‐2018). Our analysis finds that: (1) voters’ evaluation of party leaders is significantly associated with voting for populist radical right parties; (2) leader evaluations are more important than left‐right self‐placement when it comes to voting for the populist radical right, and (3) leader effects are more important for populist radical right voters than for other voters.