Ten years ago very little was written about the radical left except a handful of country case studies, a number of comparative analyses that mainly focussed on (non-communist) 'successor parties' in Eastern Europe, and a few small-scale comparative studies of communist parties.
This is no longer the case - owing to a number of detailed works by (inter alia) Charalambous, Dunphy, Hough, Hudson, and March, we have an increasingly voluminous and detailed empirical and theoretical literature. Yet this literature is dwarfed in its scope by that pertaining to the radical right, and arguably it just touches the surface of what we need to know about this 'party family', particularly given its increasing electoral importance in Europe.
The present proposal will present a 'state of the field' analysis, summarising the main achievements and deficits of this burgeoning literature. It will concentrate DIRECTLY on several foci of the panel (e.g. the definition, nature, typology and sub-typology of the party family, and the degree to which it constitutes itself as such). It will point out possible areas for future research, including the need to focus on organisational strategies, the radical left electorate, the radical left in multilevel settings and further detailed study of radical left party ideologies.
