The Populist Radical Right: A Pathological Normalcy (original) (raw)

1. The original article does not specify the size of the population with radical right attitudes, but in another article Scheuch (Citation1967: 10) speaks of ‘a residuum of ca. 10% up to 15%’.

2. Other work that implicitly or explicitly builds upon Scheuch and Klingemann's normal pathology thesis include Nagle (Citation1970), Armingeon (Citation1995) and Winkler and Schumann (Citation1998).

3. A notable exception is the chapter by Arzheimer and Falter (Citation2002) in the Festschrift for Hans-Dieter Klingemann. Not only do they put the normal pathology thesis to the test, they actually try to test the thesis in all its complexity.

4. Andreas Wimmer (Citation2002: 2), for example, argues that ‘[d]emocracy, citizenship and national self-determination became the indivisible trinity of the world order of nation-states’.

5. Even in clearly multinational states or federations one can find such banal nationalism. The state of Belgium, for example, entails two large cultural-linguistically different groups (Dutch speakers and French speakers; as well as a tiny group of German speakers), which do not even share one (monolingual) public space. At the same time, the Belgian Constitution explicitly states that ‘[a]ll power emanates from the Nation’ (article 33; emphasis added).

6. The influential American conservative thinker Peter Viereck (Citation1949: 30) has argued that conservatism should be ‘the political secularization of the doctrine of original sin’.

7. EU-12 refers to the EU between 1980 and 1995, when it included the following 12 member states: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. In 1995, Austria, Finland and Sweden joined, transforming it into the EU-15. In 2004, 10 new, mainly East European countries joined (Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia), making it the EU-25. With the addition of Bulgaria and Romania, in 2007, the European Union is currently knows as the EU-27.

8. Few attempts at constructing such multidimensional measurement models have been undertaken so far. The few existing models are heavily influenced by the models, not the theory, of Adorno and his collaborators. Unfortunately, they have been developed for different, if related, concepts (notably the ‘extreme right’ and ‘far right’), and have been applied and tested in only limited local or regional contexts (e.g. De Witte et al. Citation1994; Meijerink et al. Citation1995, Citation1998).

9. For example, Special Eurobarometer 41 on ‘Racism and Xenophobia’ (November 1989) asked respondents whether they approved with ‘movements in favour of racism’. Obviously, ‘only’ 4 per cent of EU-12 citizens approved ‘completely’, and 6 per cent ‘to some extent’ (16).

10. A recent example, using mainstream coalition theories to explain the government participation of radical right parties, is De Lange (Citation2008).

11. Hence, the finding that xenophobic attitudes are a rather poor explanator of populist radical right voting behaviour (e.g. Rydgren Citation2008).

12. In short, party A owns position X (on issue Y) when a large part of the electorate that (1) cares about issue Y and (2) holds position X, trusts party A to be the most competent party to shift policies (directly or indirectly) towards issue position X.

13. The VB copied most of its infamous anti-immigrant 70-Point Program from the FN's 50-Point Program (see Mudde Citation2000).