Why do radical right parties mobilize successfully in certain countries but fail in others? In Extreme Reactions: Radical Right Mobilization in Eastern Europe, Lenka Bustikova advances a new theory that links radical right electoral success or failure with the symbolic and material accommodation of minorities, drawing from the example of post-communist democracies. The book expands on her research previously published in Comparative Political Studies (2014) and The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right (2018), among others, and has been praised as one of the most valuable contributions to scholarship by various reviewers, including Erin Jenne for Perspectives on Politics (2020), Michael Minkenberg for European Political Science (2021), and Ryan Shaffer for Europe-Asia Studies (2020). Due to the originality of the theory that may well travel beyond eastern Europe, Bustikova’s work is a must-read for scholars of the far right, nationalism, and populism world-wide.
Searching for explanations for the dynamics of radical right mobilization in post-communist eastern Europe beyond recurrent notions such as economic insecurity, institutional volatility, and xenophobia, Bustikova focuses on the impact of “minority accommodation” policies. Similar to the notion of “welfare chauvinism” designating the resentment against immigrant minorities in western Europe, she introduces the concept of “policy hostility” that defines radical right politics as a backlash against policies that elevate the status of minorities, such as the expansion of linguistic rights or the allocation of state funds towards minority institutions (chapters 1 and 2). The argument holds that radical right success does not arise from the existence of minorities as such, but is a reaction to minorities’ or their allies’ effective use of the democratizing political process to elevate their own status vis-à-vis countries’ titular majorities. Majority members resent minorities’ status elevation, fearing the loss of social status or an outright reversal of the social hierarchy.
At the core of Bustikova’s theoretical framework is her conceptualization of party systems, particularly their polarization into radical right parties and their “bilateral opposites,” alongside “mainstream” parties (chapter 1 and 3). A radical right party is here “a single-issue party that occupies a niche, extreme position in the party system, and is either nationalistic and/or socially conservative” (5). Drawing from Giovanni Sartori’s Parties and Party Systems (1976), she posits that radical right parties have “bilateral opposites,” that is, ethnic parties or socially liberal parties that advocate for multiculturalism and the protection of minorities. Those are the direct “electoral enemies” of the radical right (72). In the following analysis, parties are accordingly classified based on a grid-group theoretical framework, which allows to distinguish four ideal-types of parties according to their levels of “radical nationalism” and “social-cultural conservatism” (71–82 and appendix).
To test her theory, Bustikova develops an elaborate multi-method research design within the positivist paradigm. Her methodological toolbox includes a time-series cross-national analysis of post-communist democratic elections, that is, 93 elections in 17 countries from 1991 to 2012 (chapter 3), and two country case studies, namely radical right mobilization against Hungarians in Slovakia and against Russians in Ukraine (chapter 4 and 5). Throughout the book, she moreover draws from numerous examples relating to other cases, explaining the trajectories of notorious players such as the Hungarian Jobbik, the Bulgarian Ataka, and the League of Polish Families in relation to the accommodation of Roma, Turkish, and social minorities.
Overall, both the time-series cross-national analysis and the case studies provide strong support for the theory. The dataset confirms two out of three hypotheses (83–84), namely that radical right success depends on and thus follows the previous electoral success of an ethno-liberal party or its previous inclusion into a governing coalition. In fact, the radical right’s electoral prospects double in reaction to an ethno-liberal party being able to influence minority accommodation policies, for instance after performing well in previous elections (p. 93) or being included into a governing coalition (92). For example, in Ukraine “the battles over the expansion of the usage of the Russian language […] mobilized the radical elements among Ukrainian patriots as never before since independence in 1991” (169). The analysis provides qualified support for Bustikova’s third hypothesis that connects radical right success to the ideological extremism of ethnic parties, showing that the ideology of the radical right’s “bilateral opposites” indeed matters but only in relation to their presence in a governing coalition (98).
The case studies of Slovakia and Ukraine aim to show the modifying effect of the size of minorities on the demand for radical right politics: Based on original survey data and qualitative interviews with both radical right and minority politicians, Bustikova demonstrates that the existence and political organization of comparatively small minorities, such as the Hungarians in Slovakia, tend to benefit the radical right, while large aspiring minorities such as the Russians in Ukraine typically curtail radical right success. In the context of a large minority that outright threatens the majority’s status in the social hierarchy, majority members apparently refrain from voting niche parties in favor of strong mainstream parties that may be better apt to uphold the status quo.
While Bustikova provides an excellent model of how to explain and study the dynamics of radical right politics, a few issues deserve further attention in future work. First, the conceptualization of radical right parties as “niche” and “single-issue” players is not entirely exact (anymore). Rather, recent empirical evidence points to the increasing mainstreaming and normalization of the radical right, notably in Poland and Hungary where radical right forces in government strategically undermine key principles of liberal democracy apart from minority protection, including the rule of law and media freedom. Second, beyond the issue of minority size, the effect of the past and present role of kin states should be further examined. In Ukraine, for example, the mobilization against Russian speakers’ rights also relates to forced Russification in the past as well as an aggressive, war-waging kin state in the present. Third, the book partly undermines the active role of the supply-side of politics, treating majority members’ fears of “status reversal” as a given rather than exploring how strategic radical right players discursively generate such fears. Finally, future research would benefit from adopting a “localist” perspective rather than the “methodological nationalism” recurrent in political science, as recently suggested in the field of populism-studies by Mark Chou, Benjamin Moffitt, and Rachel Busbridge in the Swiss Political Science Review (2021). Case studies of multicultural countries such as Ukraine invite for an analysis at sub-national level, emphasizing the importance of regional strongholds of the radical right.
To conclude, for scholars and practitioners interested in combatting the radical right worldwide, Bustikova’s work implies two rather disillusioning observations. Revealing fear, jealousy, and greediness as the main drivers of political (voting) behavior, also in the context of historically multicultural societies, it does not leave much hope that western-style welfare chauvinism toward “new” immigrant minorities will fade over time through habituation effects or similar. In a world with fast rising numbers of forcibly displaced persons, this troubling finding foreshadows an increasing polarization of political systems. Second, as the most effective way to curtail radical right mobilization appears to be the undermining of liberal democracy itself, namely by cutting back minority rights, it seems that committed democrats have no option other than to accept the radical right as a stable player within party politics.
