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This chapter uses a unique collection of hundreds of issues of Golden Dawn (GD) publications and dozens of interviews with the GD leadership and activists to systematically trace its evolution from a street-level gang to the third biggest political party in Greece. The first part of the chapter briefly traces the development of the GD in the 1980s from a small National Socialist ideological movement to a marginal political party. The second part focuses on the ideological, programmatic and, more importantly, the organizational development of the party since the early 1990s. The third section focuses on its local party organizations and their activities, providing a rare overview of internal organizational life.
This chapter examines how institutional responses to extremist right-wing parties affect their local organizational development. Institutional responses to extremism are usually subsumed in scholarly analyses of how democratic states use “militant democracy” to deal with actors threatening their democratic foundations. The first section of this chapter reviews this work to generate expectations about the effects of militant democracy policies on the organizational development of political parties. Whereas scholarly work on militant democracy tends to focus on outright bans of political parties by judicial authorities, this book adopts a broader definition to include a wider range of institutional responses and to examine how these responses affect central party organizations and then trickle down to party subunits. The second section examines the responses of the Greek state to the Golden Dawn (GD). It naturally focuses on the years before and after the arrest and criminal prosecution of the party leadership in 2013. Going beyond this judicial process, it also examines the varying responses of other institutional actors – police and municipal authorities – to the GD. The third section examines how state intervention affected the local organizational development of the GD.
This chapter seeks to probe the generalizability of the findings outside the Greek context by examining the organizational development of extremist right-wing parties in Germany and Slovakia. Utilizing the analytical framework developed and tested in the previous chapters, this chapter investigates the organizational development of two relatively similar parties in two distinct settings, the German National Democratic Party of Germany and the Kotleba – People’s Party Our Slovakia. The postwar and postcommunist contexts in which the NPD and the LSNS have developed are different from the postauthoritarian setting in which the GD evolved. The main purpose of this chapter is to show that, despite these notable contextual differences, the organizational development of the NPD and LSNS is affected by endogenous and environmental factors similar to those analyzed in Greece. The first section of the chapter briefly describes the basic characteristics of the two parties, highlighting their similarities to and differences from the GD. The second section utilizes interviews with the party leadership, organizational data from official and party documents, and the secondary literature to sketch the organizational development of the German and Slovak parties. The last section examines in turn the endogenous, electoral, institutional and societal factors affecting the development of the two parties.
The local organizational life of political parties displays notable variation that merits systematic examination. The purpose of this chapter is to document the divergent trajectories of subnational organizational units, providing the basis for the subsequent analysis of developmental variation. The first section analyzes the basic characteristics of all local party organizations the Golden Dawn (GD) set up, laying the groundwork for the subsequent analysis of variation in their organizational evolution. The second section provides insights into local organizational life by analyzing the range of activities they have undertaken over a period of twenty-three years. The third section uses these data to show the distinct trajectories of the various local units of the GD and analyze variation in organizational outcomes. It first presents evidence regarding the degree of continuity these local structures display bringing to the surface cases of organizational persistence and fatality. It then delves deeper into the organizational life of local party branches and presents data regarding their activism.
This chapter conceptualizes and classifies extremist right-wing parties by identifying their similarities to and differences from radical right-wing parties. It first produces a conceptual framework for identifying the two subgroups of the far right. Borrowing from existing literature on party families, it examines how various criteria such as the ideology, program, electorate, origins and international links of political parties can help distinguish between these two subfamilies. It then adds an important criterion this literature ignores, the type of political action parties undertake. Using this conceptual framework and the various criteria, the chapter then proceeds to the classification of forty-one parties in thirty countries.
This chapter borrows insights from the extant literature on the far right and the broader literatures on political parties, social movements and militant democracy to develop a theory of local party development. It explicates a theoretical framework examining how endogenous and environmental factors shape the development of extremist right-wing party organizations, at the national and, more importantly, at the subnational level. It first looks at how internal party characteristics shape the capacity of extremist right-wing parties to grow roots in local societies. It then focuses on environmental factors: it examines how electoral, institutional and societal factors affect local party trajectories.
Why do local party organizations succeed in some settings but fail in others? The purpose of this chapter is to start providing explanations for the varied trajectories of subnational party organizations. This chapter looks at how endogenous factors affect local organizational development. The first part of this chapter seeks to utilize insights from the broader literature on political parties and the extant literature on far right parties to analyze how endogenous (party-specific) factors might account for variation in local organizational outcomes. It focuses on two characteristics of extremist right-wing parties that affect their development: they are charismatic and movement parties. The remainder of the chapter utilizes insights from dozens of interviews with Golden Dawn functionaries and thousands of party documents to trace how endogenous factors affected the trajectory of local party branches. The second section looks at factors that are specific to the national party and the third section examines whether organizational outcomes are endogenous to the local units themselves.
This chapter discusses the findings of this study and its distinct contributions to the analysis of far right parties, party organizations, social movement and militant democracy.
This chapter begins the examination of how environmental factors shape the local organizational development of extremist right-wing parties by looking into the way electoral dynamics shape organizational choices and outcomes. It first engages with the broader and extant literature examining the link between electoral and organizational factors. It uses this literature to generate hypotheses on how electoral incentives shape the organizational trajectories of local party branches. The first empirical section of the chapter focuses on how electoral considerations shaped the organizational choices the GD made. The second empirical section investigates how various electoral factors, such as electoral performance, district size or local incumbency, helped shape organizational outcomes.
Many have depicted a steady rise in lifestyle politics. Individuals are increasingly using everyday life choices about consumption, transportation, or modes of living to address political, environmental, or ethical issues. While celebrated by some as an expansion of political participation, others worry this trend may be detrimental for democracy, for instance, by reducing citizens to consumers. Implicit in this common critique is the notion that lifestyle politics will replace, rather than coexist with or lead to, other forms of political participation. We provide the first detailed longitudinal analysis to test these hypotheses. Using unique panel data from 1538 politically active individuals from the Flemish region of Belgium (2017–18), we demonstrate that over time, lifestyle politics functions as a gateway into institutionalized and non-institutionalized modes of political participation and that this relationship is mediated by individuals’ increased political concerns.
Much scholarly attention has been given to the potentially disruptive distributional implications of new technologies in labor markets. Less explored is the way citizens as socially embedded individuals perceive and respond to technological transformation. This study fills this gap by exploring how welfare state institutions shape and are shaped by citizens’ perceptions of technological transformation. My analysis covering over 50 developed and developing countries finds that welfare state generosity is associated with a greater acceptance of technological change. I also provide evidence consistent with the expectation that labor market interventions of the welfare state have the potential to reduce the skill cleavage over technological transformation by mitigating the insecurity faced by the low-skilled. Additionally, citizens embracing technological transformation are more supportive of the welfare state than techno-skeptics are.
Organizing Against Democracy investigates some of the most important challenges modern democracies face, filling a distinctive gap in the literature, both empirically and theoretically. Ellinas examines the attempts of three of the most extreme European far-right parties to establish roots in local societies, and the responses of democratic actors. He offers a theory of local party development to analyze the many factors affecting the evolution of far-right parties at the subnational level. Using extraordinarily rich data, the author examines the 'lives' of local far-right party organizations in Greece, Germany and Slovakia, studying thousands of party activities and interviewing dozens of party leaders and functionaries, and antifascists. He goes on to explore how and why extreme parties succeed in some local settings while, in others, they fail. This book broadens our understanding of right-wing extremism, illuminating the factors limiting its corrosiveness.
Recently, awareness of the importance of health in explaining political participation has grown considerably. Studies have focused on individual participation forms but not on broader participation modes. Furthermore, analyses of the mechanisms explaining the health effects have been lacking. Here, structural equation models are employed to study the relationship between health, political trust, and institutional and non-institutional participation using data from Finland. Poor health is related to increased non-institutional participation, while good health boosts traditional institutional participation, although the latter relationship is very weak. These observations are explained by differences in political trust. Those in good health have stronger trust in the political system, while poor health is connected with reduced trust. These differences manifest themselves in varying behaviour. Poor health decreases trust which leads to increased non-institutional participation, while good health leads to a high trust and institutional activities.