Extremist right-wing parties pose one of the most notable challenges to liberal democratic systems. This book breaks new ground by examining the organizational development of some of the most extreme parties in Europe at the local, rather than the national, level. The systematic analysis of evidence from hundreds of local branches and thousands of local activities demonstrates that even these highly centralized parties display notable subnational variation in how they develop. In some local settings, these really extreme parties have been particularly successful, and in others they have miserably failed. To account for the remarkable differences in local organizational life, this study explicates and then tests an analytical framework for understanding the local organizational development of extremist rightwing parties. It systematically examines how endogenous and environmental factors affect the capacity of these parties to penetrate local societies. This book builds on and pushes beyond the voluminous literature on the European far right parties and contributes to the broader literatures on political parties, social movements and militant democracies.

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.