Right-wing Populist Research Articles

Political realignment in Western Europe in the twenty-first century: eroding satisfaction and trust in democracy and its institutions?

ABSTRACT European democracies appear to be facing substantial difficulties. Challenges arise from the emergence of right-wing populist parties and the withdrawal of citizens from established political parties. These changes it is claimed have led to an erosion of trust in the democratic political system. Drawing on ten waves of the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2020 in 11 Western European countries we test the evidence for a decline in democratic sentiment. Results do not support any deterioration in satisfaction with the way democracy works and trust in parliament, legal and police systems. Nor have hostile attitudes to immigrants increased in this period. Given the general rise in the electoral support for these parties our findings appear puzzling. However, while the evidence indicates no deterioration, attitudes to political parties and parliaments were far from positive in 2002 providing fertile ground for the emergence of populist radical right-wing parties.

Introduction: Marxifying IR, IRifying Marxism

Although the neglect of Marxism has been a pervasive characteristic of IR theory, there has been a marked revival of interest in Marxism. Marx’s materialist insights into the general historical development of societies, as well as his critique of capitalism and political economy, have served as alternative starting points for different critical approaches to IR and offers a welcome alternative to neorealism, constructivism, and poststructuralism that have dominated IR for several decades. Marxism provides a redefinition of IR by focusing on changes in material circumstances, historical conditions, and society instead of assuming unchanging and fixed structures of anarchy or the state. Marx’s analysis and insights into the dynamics of international relations have become even more important given the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism, the rise of authoritarianism, right-wing nationalist populisms, and the racial and gendered subordinations accompanying them pointing to the importance of Marxifying IR and IRifying Marxism.

From Denial to the Culture Wars: A Study of Climate Misinformation on YouTube

ABSTRACT Climate change is becoming a new front in the culture wars, with YouTube as one of its key arenas. Centered on an “Alternative Influence Network” orbiting Spain’s right-wing populist party Vox, this article examines the underexplored role of YouTube political influencers in propagating climate misinformation. Using thematic analysis, it uncovers instances of “post-denial” narratives that accept the reality of climate change while targeting climate policy and the climate movement, often through conspiracy theories and misogynistic rhetoric. Disagreements extend beyond policy specifics, intertwining with ongoing culture wars against a “woke wave” encompassing feminism, anti-racism, and now environmentalism. Amidst escalating opposition to Net Zero policies, the study sheds light on how these climate narratives reinforce “us” vs “them” binaries and appeal to feelings of resentment among young white males disoriented by rapid cultural change, who increasingly turn to YouTube for news and community. Despite these divisions, the study identifies potential common ground in environmental values and benefits like clean air.

Beyond ‘Infodemic’: Complexity, Knowledge and Populism in COVID-19 Crisis Governance

ABSTRACT The concept of the ‘infodemic’ has become a popular explanation for the rejection of anti-COVID-19 crisis governance measures. In this paper, we argue that infodemic is an inherent property of society under free institutions misused to pursue an epistemically vicious political epistemology. Furthermore, we provide an alternative account of political epistemology of COVID-19 governance and popular resistance to it. Namely, we argue that 1) pandemics represent a complex problem, and some level of resistance to governance which restricts liberties while informed by ongoing scientific and political learning processes is inevitable, and 2) the resistance is exacerbated by the history of technocratization of governance and the exclusionary socio-economic inequalities which condition political and epistemic deficiencies easily exploitable by the political entrepreneurs of right-wing populism, particularly under the conditions of social media which gamifies public discourse. Thus, we argue, the correct response to the cultures of rejection of anti-COVID-19 measures is to change the underlying political and economic conditions and not to limit speech or restrict franchise as the infodemic diagnosis suggests.

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Doug Elmendorf of Harvard University reviews “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” by Martin Wolf. The EconLit abstract of this book begins: “Promotes the argument that economic disappointment is one of the chief explanations for the rise of left- and right-wing populism in high-income democracies, focusing on what can be done to restore the relationship between capitalism and democracy.”

Unpacking Agency and Coercion

Abstract This article offers insights into how ‘boyhoods’ are shaped by class locations and experiences of poverty and problem-solving in the central Indian city of Indore. In their classed and gendered efforts to find routes to socioeconomic survival and mobility, schoolboys construct competing understandings of the relative (im)morality of violence, romance, and vigilantism. Drawing upon interviews with boys aged 13-17years, the paper unpacks how these views are shaped by caste patriarchy, urban poverty and economic informality, and local politics centering on right-wing nationalism in Indore. In the process, this article responds to calls by childhood scholars to rethink ‘agency’ in a relational and contextual way and offers accounts of marginalized masculinities that hold out possibilities for a ‘social democratic transformation’ as imagined by Raewyn Connell.

Intercultural Relations and Attitudes towards Immigrants – The Case of Slovenia

Abstract The paper analyses public opinion towards immigrants in Slovenia, especially in terms of openness and acceptance. It begins by providing some key theoretical background on the topic and then draws on selected empirical data from the European Social Survey from a cross-temporal perspective. According to survey data, respondents in Slovenia have become more open towards immigrants in recent years. However, there are significant tensions between those who are more open to and those who oppose immigration. This divide between immigration supporters and opponents is a persistent social tension that characterises political orientations in Slovenia in general. Despite the shifting public opinion towards greater tolerance, right-wing populist politicians may still target and mobilise those who remain sceptical or hostile towards immigrants.

The Discursive Dimensions of Pernicious Polarization. Analysis of Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe on Twitter

The objective of this research is to explore the political discourse of West European right-wing populist leaders in the perspective of pernicious polarization, focusing on their positions and argumentation styles. To achieve this, over 50,000 tweets from right-wing populist leaders in Western Europe (Italy, France and Spain) were collected for a period spanning from 2 July 2019, which marks the beginning of the 9th legislature of the European Parliament, to 2 July 2023. Employing Text Mining and Topic Modeling techniques, this research will reconstruct and comparatively analyze the topics addressed by the leaders from different countries and the dynamics of polarization discourse proposing an exploratory study aiming to locate the words of pernicious polarization used by each leader.

Authoritarian populist turn and market capture in Turkey: The political economy of public procurement

The state’s economic role has become more visible, beyond regulatory features, since the 2008 global financial crisis. In several cases, the new interventionist turn goes parallel to the authoritarian populist turn in international politics. Although the two processes have their own dynamics, they are still interrelated. Rather than abolishing the façade of the market economy, right-wing authoritarian populist leaders are more likely to capture the market through politically loyal economic actors. To this end, public procurement is one of the fundamental mechanisms to allocate resources. In this paper, we tested this argument in the case of Turkey by examining all public procurement deals (867,260 in total) between 2010 and 2019. We found that over a relatively short period of 10 years, the level of competitiveness, measured by the effective number of companies that receive public procurement, has decreased substantively. We also showed that the decrease in competitiveness was not limited only to the highest level of procurement deals. Across all deciles of procurement deals, competition has decreased, especially after 2013 – and this trend has continued since then.

The Distinctive Vocabularies of Right-Wing Populists

The Distinctive Vocabularies of Right-Wing Populists

Our gloomy future and glorious past: societal discontent, national nostalgia and support for populist radical-right parties in the Netherlands

Political campaign slogans, such as “Make America Great Again” or “The Netherlands Ours Again,” indicate that right-wing populists in Western countries use nostalgia to depict the national past as glorious. At the same time, populist radical-right parties (PRRP) portray this glorious past as being in stark contrast with the gloomy present of their country, which is portrayed as being in a state of decline. This suggests that PRRP in Western societies draw on both societal discontent (i.e., the belief that society is in decline and poorly functioning) and national nostalgia (i.e., a longing for the good old days of the country) to mobilize their voters. Although there is a burgeoning literature on reasons for PRRP electoral support, fewer studies have focused on its emotional or affective underpinnings. While scholars have proposed that both societal discontent and national nostalgia are an integral piece of a new master-frame employed by PRRP in Western countries to increase their electoral appeal, these elements have hardly been empirically studied in reference to voters. Relying on an integration of research in political science and social psychology, we hypothesized that both societal discontent and national nostalgia go together with a greater sympathy, and likelihood of voting, for PRRP. In addition, we predicted that national nostalgia is an explanatory mechanism that links societal discontent to more support for PRRP. These hypotheses were tested in the context of the Netherlands, among a representative sample of native Dutch voters, using the Dutch Parliamentary Elections Study of 2021. Results demonstrated that while both societal discontent and national nostalgia were relevant predictors of PRRP support, there was no strong evidence for national nostalgia as an explanatory mechanism of the link between societal discontent and PRRP support.

Ecology for the rich? Class aspects of the green transition and the threat of right-wing populism as a reaction to its costs in Poland

This article sheds light on the class determinants of ecological attitudes and, at the same time, tries to emphasize the general importance of class differentiation for the implementation of sustainable development policies. This is particularly important in Eastern European countries where, for financial reasons, a green transition raises concerns among social groups that may feel threatened by additional socioeconomic costs. Using empirical data collected in Poland, we point out that the challenges, implementation, and social costs of a green transition can be used by populist and nationalist right-wing politicians. At the same time, right-wing populists depict ecological activists as a threat to the interests of “ordinary people” and identify them with the liberal metropolitan elites, detached from the worries of people with lower incomes and residents of traditionalist provinces. In the current conditions, the fear of increases in energy and fuel prices may be another source of support for an anti-ecological right-wing agenda against the “global pressure” of the liberal establishment. This narrative may be particularly attractive in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries in Europe and around the world as it refers not only to ideological arguments but also to the economic interests of “ordinary people.”

Courts and democratic backsliding: A comparative perspective on the United States

AbstractThis article argues that courts in the United States are comparatively less likely to be captured than those of many other countries and more able to resist an authoritarian populist regime, but also somewhat more likely to facilitate democratic backsliding on their own account. In this way, they potentially could—and arguably already do—provide a relatively rare case of “abusive judicial review” by independent courts. The article also briefly considers whether the US experience provides any insights for the relationship of courts and democratic backsliding in other countries, and especially how the ability of courts to resist capture might be bolstered.

Superpower CorruptsAntagonistic Superpowers Corrupt Absolutely

If power tends to corrupt, then imagine what superpower can do. Three superpowers, each imbalanced in its own way—toward state communism (China), private capitalism (United States), and national populism (Russia)—vie with each other for global supremacy, all with a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons under the control of a single individual. Whether malevolent or mistaken, any one can provoke World War III. We shall, therefore, have to think outside the superpower box, for example, by favoring grounded communityship over centralized leadership, and global governance beyond antagonistic superpower.

Backsliding versus Backlash: Do Challenges to Democracy in East Central Europe Threaten LGBTQIAP Empowerment?

If third-wave democratization propelled gains in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, asexual, and pansexual (LGBTQIAP) empowerment globally, does the contemporary wave of democratic backsliding imperil those gains? To what extent does the potential threat from such institutional erosion depend on the presence of right-wing populists in government, i.e., backlash? Can both threats be moderated by international pressure? Here, I present a theoretical framework for analyzing the interaction of backsliding, backlash, and international leverage as they impact LGBTQIAP empowerment. I then empirically probe this model’s plausibility by analyzing annual changes in LGBT empowerment through 2020 in fourteen new democracies in east central Europe. (The empirical analysis uses the narrower category “LGBT” because of data limitations.) I find that when neither backsliding nor backlash is present, LGBT empowerment expands regardless of international leverage. When both are present, however, international leverage is critical. If leverage is low, I find that LGBT empowerment declines, and the magnitude of losses in empowerment is greater than the magnitude of gains when neither is present. If leverage is high, simultaneous backlash and backsliding are associated with gains in LGBT empowerment. Even if the latter gains may be seen more as “pink-washing” than as sustainable and genuine change, these findings underline the importance of paying attention to international context when analyzing LGBTQIAP politics as the third wave ebbs.

Upwind Despite Headwind? Degrowth Transformations Amidst Shrinkage and Eroding Democracy in an East German Small Town

Spatial transformation follows the logic of a growth-oriented economy that values cities according to their place in the chain of capitalist wealth production. Many cities in East Germany have lost their significance as sites of production and are consequently facing population decline and the weakening of social bonds in the community. For this reason, citizens of the East German small town of Zella-Mehlis (state of Thuringia) have begun to reflect on alternative models for urban development. In this article, the process of arriving at a degrowth strategy, as provided by the academic discourse, will be documented. It will be demonstrated that the process of shrinkage has not only left little space for a degrowth planning approach put into practice. Moreover, the article reveals that the costs of the growth economy on society are not limited to population shrinkage, but also have a severe impact on the sociability of the local community. The rise of right-wing populists and climate change-denying actors mirrors the decreasing social ability for collective learning processes needed for a shift to a solidary degrowth strategy. However, the case study shows how ambivalent these developments are: Long-term participatory processes within the public–civic partnership framework of the Aufwind (German for upwind) initiative in Zella-Mehlis can challenge path dependencies and open new degrowth-inspired perspectives. The article is informed by many years of intensive field research in a qualitative mixed-method design and focuses on the close links between shrinkage processes, the local degrowth agenda, and the consequences of an eroding democracy.

Why is ‘clean’ energy opposed? the resistances to geothermal energy projects in Turkey

This study focuses on the resistance to geothermal energy projects in the Aegean region in Turkey. It explores, drawing on the analysis of documents and the fieldwork conducted in four Aegean cities, why there is a widespread local resistance to geothermal energy, which is widely promoted as environmentally benign and renewable and, as such, critical for the low-carbon energy transition. Examining the resistance from a political ecology perspective, I show how the power/resistance nexus in the field of renewable energy is shaped in those contexts where authoritarianism, populism, and geographically specific forms of capital accumulation operate in and through each other. Specifically, I demonstrate that the formulation of geothermal policy and practices to perpetuate and consolidate the power of the authoritarian populist AKP government laid the groundwork for the generation of widespread resistances by threatening to create new environmental injustices and to deepen existing class, and gender inequalities. The study also shows that geothermal energy may be as destructive as fossil fuel-based energy when not planned, regulated, or monitored effectively. It is concluded therefore that the practice of grouping renewable energy sources in a single ‘clean energy’ category should be reconsidered.

Fire, police cars and barricade tape: exploring visual securitisation in Sweden Democrats’ Instagram posts

ABSTRACT With the growing popularity of visual-centred social media, authoritarian populist parties are provided with more platforms and devices to position themselves as key securitising actors by engaging in the visual securitisation of issues related to immigration, law and order. This paper uses the 2022 Swedish electoral campaign as a case study to explore the securitisation in the visual discourse of authoritarian populist actors by comparing the Sweden Democrats to the mainstream right. Through a combination of thematic and multimodal critical discourse analyses, this study examined a total of 639 Instagram posts. It shows how the Sweden Democrats use semiotic strategies to represent social actors in a way that conveys the message of securitisation. The findings reveal that the authoritarian populist party adopts a visual securitising style that not only includes apparent populist aspects and relies on the linguistic elements to counterbalance the ambiguity of the image, but it is also distinct from the discursive style of the mainstream right.

Education policy and ‘free speech’ on race and faith equality at school

ABSTRACT Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics internationally about the supposed need to ‘protect free speech’ in higher education (HE), and ‘protect children’ from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school policy context. Drawing on a critical post-structural framework, we conceptualise the policy problematisation of speech as situated in a wider set of coercion-consent governing strategies used to manage contemporary authoritarian neoliberal contradictions, and to narrow the speakability of anti-racist and faith equality concerns. We present a two-stage thematic and discursive analysis of a corpus of primarily school-focused English policy texts from successive Conservative-led governments (2010–2022). The analysis outlines three main policy strategies which narrow speakability: the defining of ‘good’ schools and citizens with limited/oppositional reference to race equality, the problematising of ‘dangerous’ speech, and the indexing of school/HE subjects who are truly vulnerable to political speech. The paper offers an urgent case study of how possibilities for progressive race and faith-based expression are shaped beyond explicitly speech-focused policies, and argues that engagement of the complex governance of speakability offers nuanced possibilities for analysing bans on progressive education internationally.

Climate Change and Property Experiments in Appalachia

AbstractThis commentary thinks with Desiree Fields' ‘Digital Experiments with Landed Property’ across the urban–rural continuum. I offer provisional observations on rural property experiments emerging in Central Appalachia in the context of climate change. By way of conclusion, I suggest how scholars might engage and extend Fields' important provocations to deepen understandings of the shifting nature of land and property relations in the rural USA and the stakes thereof for rising authoritarian populism and political possibilities otherwise.