Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the Electoral Market

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 2005 M08 22 - 349 pages
During recent decades, radical right parties have been surging in popularity in many nations, gaining legislative seats, enjoying the legitimacy endowed by ministerial office, and striding the corridors of government power. The popularity of leaders such as Le Pen, Haider, and Fortuyn has aroused widespread popular concern and a burgeoning scholarly literature. Despite the interest, little consensus has emerged about the primary factors driving this phenomenon. The puzzle is to explain why radical right parties have advanced in a diverse array of democracies - including in Austria, Canada, Norway, France, Italy, New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel, Romania, Russia, and Chile - while failing to make comparable gains in similar societies elsewhere, such as in Sweden, Britain, and the United States. This book, first published in 2005, expands our understanding of support for radical right parties through presenting an integrated new theory which is then tested systematically using a wealth of cross-national survey evidence covering almost forty countries.

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Contents

Classifying the Radical Right
35
Tables
40
Comparing Parties
52
Ballot Access and Campaign Finance
83
Electoral Systems
105
The Social Basis
129
The Politics of Resentment
149
Immigration Multiculturalism
166
Party Competition
191
Consolidating Party Organizations
217
Assessing the Rise of the Radical Right and
253
Notes
273
Select Bibliography
315
Index
339
Copyright

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Page 92 - The political parties shall participate in the forming of the political will of the people. They may be freely formed. Their internal organization must conform to democratic principles. They must publicly account for the sources of their funds.
Page 92 - Parties which, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to impair or destroy the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.
Page 281 - Whatever index of change is used - a measure of trends or any of several measures of fluctuations - the picture is the same: the electoral strength of most parties in Western nations since the war had changed very little from election to election, from decade to decade, or within the lifespan of a generation.

About the author (2005)

Pippa Norris is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Her work compares elections and public opinion, gender politics, and political communications. Companion volumes by this author, also published by Cambridge University Press, include A Virtuous Circle (2000), Digital Divide (2001), Democratic Phoenix (2002), and Rising Tide (2003), Electoral Engineering (2004) and Sacred and Secular (2004).

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