Reform UK and the Territorial Politics of Radical Right Populism: Building a Framework for Comparative Analysis

The rise of Reform UK highlights how populist parties and movements in multi-level systems adapt to complex territorial realities. Initially rooted in an English populist narrative opposing both metropolitan and devolved elites, the party has recently sought to reframe itself as a UK-wide challenger, tailoring its message to distinct national and regional contexts. This dual evolution illustrates a broader but underexplored phenomenon: the territorial reconfiguration of populism across scales. Building on comparative evidence from Europe, the paper proposes a new framework distinguishing four types of territorial populism – sub-state, state-wide, hybrid territorially-adaptive (state → sub-state), and hybrid territorially-expanded (sub-state → state-wide). This typology captures how populist parties localise, rescale, or hybridise their mobilisation in response to institutional asymmetries and spatial inequalities. Through the lens of Reform UK and comparative cases such as Lega, Vox, Rassemblement National, and AfD, the paper advances a theoretical model for analysing how populism operates as a multi-scalar process that redefines the relationship between “the people” and “the territory” in contemporary Europe.