Populist and Radical Politics: Between Polarisation and Blurring

The consolidation of populist and radical organisations across Europe can be rightfully considered a fait accompli. By now, many of these parties have sustained their presence in national parliaments as well as in the European Parliament, suggesting that their responses to the political mainstream represent an intrinsic feature of contemporary democracies. This view is partly confirmed by recent research, which has progressively ceased to interpret these political organisations as a mere ‘flash in the pan’, but rather a consequence of the unaccountability of established politics. Accordingly, the focus is increasingly less on the reasons behind their emergence, and more on their ideology and voters. In other words, what matters is how well or poorly these parties fare at elections and why – often tackling these questions through the interaction of a demand-side and a supply-side in the electoral market. The appeal and resilience of these phenomena has however come to raise a number of theoretical and substantive concerns. Whilst populist and radical parties of the left and right have been responsible for the politicisation and/or mainstreaming of a number of issues (e.g. environmentalism, civil rights, immigration, ethnic minorities, Euroscepticism, etc.), the issues at the core of their ideology are no longer exclusive entitlement of these organisations. What we could observe, then, is a concomitant process of polarisation and blurring of national politics. On the one hand, parties that were once marginal surged to the level of credible agenda-setters; in turn, mainstream parties are now compelled to elaborate on their issues, or even co-opt them. Through their impact, populist and radical parties may have then contributed to polarise national politics. On the other hand, these parties have expanded on their trademark issues and it is not uncommon to find populist and radical parties of either camp sharing views on social, economic, and cultural issues. Therefore, it is possible to claim that also traditional distinctions between radical left and radical right politics are blurring. The section seeks to bring together conceptual and empirical contributions on parties and party systems, elections and voters, as well as social movements and protests, willing to improve our understanding of the following topics: a) The radicalisation of the mainstream; b) The mainstreaming or ‘race to the extremes’ of populist and radical organisations; c) Political impact of populist and radical organisations; d) Polarisation of party systems and political debates; e) Blurring of ideologies and attitudes. We will consider panel and paper proposals from different subdisciplines and with different methodological approaches. In a broad comparative spirit, however, we welcome submissions with a pan-European scope. We also seek to overcome, inasmuch as possible, the artificial gap between qualitative and quantitative approaches; therefore, submissions with a mixed-method approach are strongly encouraged.