Boundaries and Radical Right Mobilization

Political radicalism and extremism are often studied in the context of racism. By examining the politicization of minority accommodation, this article challenges a widely held assertion that prejudice and xenophobia fuel radical right support. Instead, it argues that electoral extremism originates in dissatisfaction with the ascension of minority groups to political power rather than in xenophobia. This has potentially important implications for our understanding of the effectiveness of certain accommodative arrangements to mediate ethnic tensions, especially in new democracies. Although accommodative arrangements can sometimes be effective barriers to the outbreak of a large-scale violent ethnic conflict, they can also have unexpectedly adverse effects in periods of normal politics that exacerbate rather than placate ethnic tensions. In other words, democratization sometimes does not mix well with nation building. While this insight may be accurate for the onset of democratization, it overlooks the possibility that ethnic relations might sour after the transition period as a result of an increase in domestic minority demands or due to external pressures to expand minority rights. It is perhaps surprising that the highest volume of radical right mobilization is not observed in countries with unresolved ethnic boundaries, but rather in polities with institutionally delineated boundaries between titular majority and minorities. In fact, radical right parties are often quite weak in states where national boundaries have not (yet) been firmly established. Countries such as Albania, Georgia, Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ukraine have either failed to produce radical right parties at all, or have seen radical right political mobilization very recently. This paper addresses these paradoxes, and in the course of doing so develops a new theory. It argues that once core group boundaries are settled and institutionalized, negotiations between groups move to the domain of policy. In the context of settled boundaries, policies that expand minority rights induce powerful grievances in the electorate when small ethnic and social groups are viewed as being accommodated in a manner inconsistent with their objective size and with the help of mainstream parties. The political rights and benefits achieved by minorities irritate some voters to whom radical right parties seeking to reverse those gains appeal.