What earned me the invitation was that I have written a tiny contribution to the book so many years ago that I had forgotten about it. So here, for your edification, are my two cents on radical attitudes.

Radical Attitudes
Kai Arzheimer

Like many other concepts in political science, the notion of radicalism harks back to the political conflicts of the late 18^th and 19^th century. Even then, its content was depended on the political context and far from well defined. Consequentially, being “radical” has meant different things to different people in different times and countries. Moreover, radicalism is closely related, if not identical to a number of (equally vague) concepts such as extremism, fundamentalism, and populism. As of today, there is no universally accepted definition of radicalism, and, by implication, radical attitudes

Authors version. The final text appeared in Badie/Berg-Schlosser/Morlino, International Encyclopedia of Political Science. IPSA/Sage 2011.
Radical Attitudes PDF

There is, however, a core meaning of radicalism: radicals are willing to challenge the ground rules of politics to get to the root (Latin: radix) of what they perceive as the most pressing political problems. In any given context, radicals will confront the political establishment and will support policies whose implementation would trigger systemic change.

Radicalism in the 18^th and 19^th century

In the last third of the 18^th century, a heterogeneous group of philosophers, writers and politicians began to campaign for a thorough reform of Britain’s political system. Amongst the goals of this movement were the abolition of the slave trade, a reform of the electoral laws and a better protection of citizens’ rights. They soon gained support from the emerging middle and working classes. The parliamentarian Charles James Fox is often credited with coining the name for this new movement when he demanded a “radical reform” of the electoral system in 1797, and by 1819, the “radicals” had established themselves as a separate political force that inspired the Chartist movement and played an important role in both the creation of the Liberal and the Labour Party.

Similarly, after the restoration of the monarchy in 19^th century France, supporters of republican principles called themselves “radicals”. Over the last third of the century, they drifted to the left and were instrumental in the foundation of the country’s first modern left-wing party, the “Republican, Radical and Radical-Socialist Party” in 1901.

In Germany, “radical” was initially a political label chosen by those liberals who, in the spirit of the French Revolution, demanded civil liberties, universal male suffrage and parliamentary representation. In the second half of the 19^th centuries, this label was applied those members of the workers’ movement who favoured a revolutionary change of government (i.e. an end of the authoritarian monarchist regime). In a similar fashion, in many other European and Southern American countries “radicalism” became shorthand for a subtype of liberalism that could be located either to the left or to the right of the political centre. To the present day, “radical” parties exist in many countries including Argentina, Chile, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Italy, Paraguay, and Switzerland. Most of them are today classified as either liberal or socialist/social-democratic.

Radicalism in the 20^th century

The gradual spread of liberal democracy and its crisis during the interwar period changed the meaning of the concept. In the wake of the events in Germany, Italy, Russia, and many other European countries, radicalism became a collective term for the forces at the poles of the political spectrum that had formerly be known chiefly as “ultras” and threatened to overthrow liberal democracy: Communists on the on side, Fascists and National Socialists on the other. Consequentially, radicalism was transformed into a primarily spatial term (location on the left-right axis) with a connotation that was directly opposed to its original meaning. While the original radicals had been champions of freedom and democracy, the radicals of the 20^th century were, by virtue of their ideological preferences, opposed to these values. Under the post-war consensus of the 1950s, this perspective on radicalism became dominant.

However, less than two decades after the end of the Second World War, Seymour Martin Lipset challenged the prevailing view of the connection between centrism and support for democracy. In his seminal study Political Man (1960), Lipset claimed that Fascism and National Socialism were neither left- nor right-wing ideologies. Rather, they constituted an “extremism of the centre”. While this statement is problematic if interpreted in purely sociological terms – Fascism and National Socialism appealed both to the middle and to the working classes – it reflects the ambiguous location of these regimes on the traditional Left-Right Spectrum. On the one hand, they violently suppressed the left-wing unions and parties. On the other hand, they were hardly champions of a free market economy: Fascism and National Socialism insulated farmers and small businesses from competition, engaged in large-scale economic planning and raised government spending on welfare to unprecedented levels.

More generally, Lipset argued that attitudes towards the economy and attitudes towards democracy could vary independently. In his view, any position on the Left-Right spectrum – radical or centrist – can be combined with “the repression of difference and dissent, the closing down of the market place of ideas”. This “tendency to treat cleavage and ambivalence as illegitimate” is what Lipset called extremism.

Lipset fruitfully applied this concept to right-wing extremism in the United States. In his view, the insistence on free-market principles makes this particular breed of extremisms “right-wing”, whereas anti-semitism, homophobia, racism, religious intolerance and xenophobia are simply manifestations of the same underlying generic phenomenon. Indeed, in separate work he convincingly demonstrated that these traits are also prevalent amongst members of the working class, whose criticism of free market principles marks them as left-wingers.

Lipset’s notion of extremism is so broad that it resonates with even more general concepts that were developed around the same time by psychologists such as Hans Jürgen Eysenck (“tough-mindedness”) and Milton Rokeach (“closed mindedness”, “dogmatism”) and refer to a tendency to unconditionally accept norms, prejudice and authorities. Like Lipset, Eysenck, Rokeach and many other scholars treat political preferences in general and political radicalism in particular as an essentially two-dimensional phenomenon. However, while Lipset argued that left-right ideology and support for democratic values and institutions can vary independently, other authors disagree.

In work that is partly inspired by Lipset, Uwe Backes and Eckhard Jesse claim that there is a U-shaped link between ideological radicalism and anti-democratic extremism. While they acknowledge that radicalism and extremism are conceptually different, they argue that radical ideological positions have implications that render them incompatible with liberal democracy as defined by the core values of the French revolution: liberty, equality, fraternity. According to Backes and Jesse, left-wing radicalism (Communism) overemphasises equality to the detriment of freedom whereas traditional European right-wing radicalism (Fascism) as well as American right-wing radicalism disregards equality in favour of either fraternity or liberty. In Backes’ and Jesse’s view, centrism is conducive to liberal democracy while radicalism is a necessary and sufficient condition for extremism. In a sense, the 20^th century view of radicalism has come full circle in their work, which has influenced many European scholars directly or indirectly. However, empirical evidence for the U-shaped link between radical ideological positions and opposition to liberal democracy is sparse.

Measurement issues

If radicalism is interpreted in a purely spatial sense, it simply refers to the endpoints of the ideological spectrum. The most common instrument in this context is the general left-right scale that has been employed in countless comparative and single-country studies. Since the left-right scale is still interpreted chiefly in economic terms, other, more specific scales which refer to the appropriate degree of government intervention in the economy, state control of prices and wages, or the importance of trade unions have also been used. On the other hand, more inclusive attempts at measuring radicalism include preferences on the “postmaterialist” issues such as the environment, minority rights, and direct democracy.

Logical implications of extreme positions not withstanding, most researchers would, however, agree that a position at the endpoints of any policy scale is in itself of little importance because people frequently hold inconsistent and contradictory attitudes. Therefore, a number of items and scales have been proposed to directly capture support for liberal democracy.

Arguably, the most influential amongst these were developed by Herbert McClosky in his work on democratic values. In his 1964 article, McClosky distinguishes between three sub-dimensions of democratic values: respect for the “rules of the game” on the one hand and support for freedom of expression as well as support for political, economic, social and ethnic equality on the other. McClosky’s first dimension primarily refers to formal compliance. As long as a majority of citizens has internalised these rules, they will support democratic institutions even if their grasp of the underlying principles is patchy. His second and third dimension, however, refer precisely to these principles.

A model (liberal) democrat should subscribe to both the principles and rules, whereas an anti-democrat would despise both. Real-world citizens usually find themselves somewhere in between those two poles: they agree with the rules and abstract principles, but sometimes struggle with their application. Some items on McClosky’s scale were specifically designed to capture these conflicts. For instance, 90 per cent of his respondents believed in “free speech for all no matter what their views might be”, yet 50 per cent agreed that books containing “wrong political views” did not deserve to be published and 25 per cent were ready to suspend due process for “dangerous enemies like the Communists”.

To the present day, McClosky’s work has a tremendous impact on the field, but there are some basic problems with his and all subsequent attempts to measure support for democratic values. First, the items inevitably reflect the political and historical context for which they were devised. For McColsky and many of his successors, Communism was the main threat to liberal democracy. With the advent of new ideological challenges such as Islamism and Right-Wing Populism, this is obviously not longer true. Second, the rules and sometimes even the principles that constitute liberal democracy are bound to change gradually over time. Political behaviours and issues from the New Politics agenda that were considered “radical” in the 1960s – minority rights, the environment, sit-ins and human chains etc. – are now well within the political mainstream. Therefore, finding items that work well in all countries at all times is conceptually and empirically next to impossible. Third, even if these attitudinal scales generate measurements that are valid across time and space, they lack a natural cut-off point. At best, they are able to identify the most radical persons in society. However, where the boundary lies between democrats and radicals is an entirely different question.

Kai Arzheimer (University of Essex)

See also Communism, Democracy, Theory of, Democracy, Types, Fascism, Fundamentalism, Ideology, Islamist Movements, Left-Right Spectrum, Liberalism, Peasants’ Movements, Political Attitudes, Populism, Postmaterialism

Further Readings

Backes, Uwe. 2007. “Meaning and Forms of Political Extremism in Past and Present,” Central European Political Studies Review 9 (4): 242–62.

Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1959. “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism,” American Sociological Review 24: 482–501.

Lipset, Seymour M. 1960. Political Man. The Social Bases of Politics. Garden City: Doubleday.

Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Earl Raab. 1971. The Politics of Unreason. Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970. London: Heinemann.

McClosky, Herbert. 1964. “Consensus and Ideology in American Politics,” The American Political Science Review 58 (2): 361–82.

Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react

makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument: if radical right support is stable in the medium term, and if other parties react to past successes for the radical right by modifying their manifestos, this relationship might be spurious. In my paper for the ECPR conference at Potsdam, I use a time-series model  to address this problem: I estimate a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of radical right support and issue salience in France (while controlling for immigration and unemployment). As it turns out, salience is independent of previous radical right success. This finding provides some support for my original argument, though the analysis  preliminary and restricted to France (at the moment).

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The European Consortium for Political Science (ECPR), for all purposes and intents the European Political Science Association, has a tiny problem: at their last meeting, they faced “a shortage of candidates” for the Executive Committee. To their credit, they faced it head on and set up a blog to discuss  “Constitutional and Electoral in (of?) the ECPR”. So far, there is just the inaugural post but I’m sure there is more to come.

Here is the (almost) finalised program for the our section on the Radical Right in Perspective, organised under the auspices of the ECPR’s 5th General Conference (Potsdam, September 10-12), boasting about 50 papers.

• Post-Soviet Russian Nationalism: Ideology, Context, Comparison
  • The ‘New Political Novel’ by Right-Wing Writers in Post-Soviet Russia
  • Ethnic Conflict and Radical Right in Estonia: An Explosive Mixture?
  • How far is Moscow Weimar? Similarities and Dissimilarities between Inter-War Germany and Post-Soviet Russia
  • From Communist Totalitarianism to Right-wing Radicalism: The Dynamics of the Crimean Peripheral Politics and Its Impact on the Ukrainian State
  • Moderating/Mediating the Extreme: The Accommodation of Xenophobic Nationalist Views on Vladimir Pozner’s Vremena Programme
  • Right-wing extremism among immigrant adolescents from the FSU in Israel and Germany
• The causes for the success and failure of the radical right in Central and Eastern Europe
  • Are there opportunity structures for the Radical Right? A comparative analysis of the Visegrad Group countries.
  • Explaining the failure of radical right parties in Estonia
  • Manoeuvring for the Right: Atypical Features of a Bulgarian Radical Right-Wing Party
  • The Diffusion of Radical Right Ideology in Central-Eastern Europe: Cultural Resonance and Issue Ownership Strategies as Factors Behind Electoral Support Takeover
  • The Radical Right in Bulgaria
  • From Alienation of the Working Class to the Rise of the Far Right? Party Strategy and Cleavage Evolution in Post-Communist Societies
• On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political Movements of the New Radical Right
  • Radical Right and the Use of Political Violence: Idealist Hearths in Turkey in the 1970s.
  • Extreme Right and Populism: a Frame Analysis of Extreme Right Wing Discourses in Italy and Germany
  • “Armed spontaneism”: an independent revolutionary way in the Italian extreme right-wing groups
  • Movement Against Illegal Immigration: analysis of the central node in the Russian extreme-right movement network
  • Mobilizing Activism: A comparative analysis of the contemporary Right-Wing Extremists and Islamists in Germany
  • Why There has been Little Violence among East European Radicals? Transformations of Tolerance in Post-peasant Eastern Europe
• Consequences of the surge of anti-immigration parties
  • Anti-immigrant party support and newspaper coverage: a cross-national and over-time perspective
  • A Populist Zeitgeist? Populist Discourse among Mainstream Political Parties in Western Europe
  • The Surge of the Swiss Peoples Party: Implications at Switzerland’s Subnational Level
  • Immigration policy and the populist radical right in office: The policy impact of the FPÖ/BZÖ, 2000-06
  • Rhetoric or reality? Platforms and actions of anti-immigration parties
• The Radical Right in Western Europe
  • A Matter of Timing? The Salience of Immigration and the Dynamics of Radical Right Electoral Success
  • Old Cleavages and New Actors in the Formation of a New Cultural Divide: Why a Right-Wing Populist Party Emerged in France but not in Germany
  • The Programmatic Positions of Established Parties and their Influence on Extreme Right Parties Vote Share
  • The Influence of the Programs of Far Right Parties on the Electoral System
  • Radical Right, Populism and the Fear of Democracy
  • Explaining anti-immigrant party support in Western Europe: individual grievances, elite failure or social context?
  • Comparing radical right party ideology and the voters’ profile and attitudes: a study on the Danish People’s Party, the Northern League and the Austrian Freedom Party
• Inside the Radical Right: An Internalist Perspective
  • The Public Image of Leaders of Right-Wing Populist Parties: the Role of the Mass Media
  • ‘This rally is a must’ – Which factors lead neo-Nazis to take part in demonstration marches?
  • Right-wing extremist groups and Internet: Construction of Identity, Source of Mobilization and Organization
  • “Enemy from inside” the party and … inside us? What the researcher does to the local teams of the radical right in France: return to a possible controversial relationship
  • Pan-German student fraternities and the Austrian Freedom Party: A reciprocal relationship
• Party-based Euroscepticism in Western and Eastern Europe
  • europeanization of euroscepticism? the significance of european parliament groups and factions for the typology and ideological classification of party-based euroscepticism
  • euroscepticism of turkish political parties
  • hellenes-barbarians and european civilization: a conceptual approach to the ideologies of the greek far right.
  • hungary – between euroenthusiasm and euroscepticsm
  • radical right euroscepticism and the theory of strategic choice
• neighbourhood effects revisited: the visualisation of immigrants and radical right-wing vote
  • Presence of Migrants and Radical Right Support across Different Levels of National Institutionalisation
  • Exploring the Contextual Determinants of the anti-immigrant vote: The Case of the LPF
  • Explaining the extreme right resurgence in English local elections 2002-8: a spatial model of aggregate data
  • Ethnic Identity of Second Generation Immigrants across German Regions
  • Radical right’s neighbourhoods: considering meso level explanations for its success through a case-study at the local level
  • Is Local Diversity Harmful for Social Capital? A Multilevel Research on Flemish Data
  • Immigration, diversity and civic culture in Spain
• The radical right and the debate over immigration policy
  • After Fortuyn: new radical right-wing populist parties in the Netherlands
  • Plataforma per Catalunya: emergence, features and quest for legitimacy of a new radical right party in the Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia
  • The impact of anti-immigration parties: a comparison between the Flemish VB and the Walloon FN
  • The (de)politicization of immigrant integration and policy outcome in Belgium.

The program is still somewhat in flux, and any omissions are accidental.

• The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe
• The Internationalisation of the Radical Right
• Will Fascism return?
• On the Borderline Between Protest and Violence: Political Movements of the New Radical Right
• Consequences of the surge of anti-immigration parties
• The Radical Right in Western Europe
• Inside the Radical Right: An Internalist Perspective
• Party-based Euroscepticism in Western and Eastern Europe
• Neighbourhood Effects Revisited: the Visualisation of Immigrants and Radical Right-Wing Voting

Each panel can have up to five paper givers, so the section offers us a chance to bring together cutting edge research on the Populist/Extreme/Radical Right from various subfields (parties, voters, rational choice, normative theory – you name it). Please submit your abstract via the the electronic submission system to the appropriate panel(s).

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