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date: 31 May 2020

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter begins by outlining some persistent challenges—conceptual, methodological, and theoretical—that have characterized the study of party organization in general, and radical right organization in particular. It then evaluates recent work and contends that it has done more than establish that “organization matters.” The intellectual challenge of demonstrating a causal relationship between organization and dependent variables of interest should not be underestimated. But in the social sciences, everything “matters” to some degree, so simply calling attention to another dynamic of the radical right phenomenon would be useful but perhaps not so interesting. Fortunately, recent work on radical right party organization (including several studies that include radical right parties in their comparative framework) offer excellent examples of creative data collection and theoretical innovation. Finally, the chapter speculates about what lines of inquiry are worth pursuing, and which ones might not be worth the intellectual investment.

Keywords: radical right, right-wing parties, political parties, party organization

David Art

David Art is Professor of Political Science at Tufts University. His field is comparative politics, with a regional focus on Europe. His research interests include extremist political parties and movements, the politics of history and memory, and comparative historical analysis in the social sciences. He is the author of Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge University Press, 2006). His articles have appeared in Comparative Politics, German Politics and Society, Party Politics, and West European Politics. He was co-convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research’s Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy.

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