Sub-national determinants of far-right radicalism. Does within country context matter for the success of populist radical-right actors?

Abstract

Support for populist, radical, and even extremist right-wing actors varies greatly across time and between countries. For more than two decades, scholars have tried to identify contextual factors (economic growth and unemployment, immigration, but also institutional and party system factors) that may create oder moderate demand for far-right policies and could therefore help us to understand the fluctuations and more durable differences right-wing success. Somewhat more recently, however, researchers have turned their attention to the remarkable differences in right-wing support that exist within many countries. The strength of UKIP in declining seaside towns, the strongholds of the French National Rally in the south-east, north-east and the north-west of the country, or the disproportionate success of the AfD in the former territory of the GDR are all cases in point. Belgium, where for decades the Vlaams Blok/Belang has been a relevant player in Flanders while the National Front/Democracy never took off in Wallonia, is an even more extreme example. These countries, as well as other, more localised disparities in far-right success, illustrate an important point. For many citizens, local and regional circumstances may well be just as significant as, and in some cases more significant, than, national ones. At the same time, political, social, and economic conditions as well as historical-cultural legacies vary considerably within larger states and may therefore provide the key to understanding differences in right-wing mobilisation. Of course, the existence of regional strongholds and of spatial social and economic disparities that may drive regional resentment is hardly a new phenomenon. Some far-right parties (primarily the Vlaams Blok/Belang and the Lega Nord) even pursue(d) a separatist agenda. What seems to have changed, however, is that pre-existing centre/periphery or urban/rural cleavages increasingly align with what has been dubbed the "cultural", "transnational", or "universalism-particularism" dimension of political conflict, and that right-wing actors seem to get better and better at exploiting local and regional grievances and identities. As a result, phrases like the "left behind" or "urban elites" are now common in everyday conversations about politics, and concepts like localism and place-based resentment have gained currency in the field. The proposed panel aims at bringing together researchers interested in these developments. We are interested not only in demand-side analyses, which investigate why citizens in some areas are more inclined to support the far right, but also in supply-side approaches that trace the roots of local/regional far-right cultures and organisational strength. While much of the existing work on subnational differences in far-right mobilisation and success is (almost by necessity) based on case studies or single-country studies, we are particularly interested in comparative work and in contributions that try to get an analytical handle on these phenomena.

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