Political Radicalism in Times of Crisis

Political radicalism in European party systems has attracted considerable scholarly attention in the past decades and continues to be a topic which begs for further research. Many contributions have, for instance, appeared on the phenomenon of radical right-wing populism in Western Europe, and political parties which have represented this ideology. The fall of communism in Europe, now almost a quarter of a century ago, created new scope for the study of political radicalism in the new democracies of Europe. More recently, the financial crisis has had a great impact, not only on European economies, but also on the political discourse and the potential for radical parties on both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’. This section aims to bring together research agendas from various subdisciplines, which have in common the study of developments in, and impact of, political radicalism across Europe. It seeks to bring together state-of-the-art research on party political developments on the fringes of the political spectrum, as well as the more general presence of radical discourse across European party systems. This includes research on: i) the performance of the radical left and right, in terms of electoral results, policy achievements, as well as impact on mainstream party positions; ii) the varieties of political radicalism across Europe, with a particular focus on comparisons between ‘East’ and ‘West’; iii) developments in the discourse of radical parties and the potential for populism and Euroscepticism, especially in light of the recent European economic crisis and the 2014 European elections. The section will host panels and papers from a variety of subdisciplines and with different methodological approaches, focusing on both the supply of and the demand for political radicalism. The focus is explicitly pan-European: the section aims at striking a balance between contributions studying established Western democracies and those focusing on post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe. Especially welcome are contributions that bridge this, arguably increasingly artificial, geographical gap. Equally welcome are contributions which bridge methodological gaps, and present research on the basis of mixed-method approaches.