scholarly journals Who Is Open to Authoritarian Governance within Western Democracies?

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Ariel Malka ◽  
Yphtach Lelkes ◽  
Bert N. Bakker ◽  
Eliyahu Spivack
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Economic Attitudes ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Western Democracies

Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind, we explored which ideological groups are most open to authoritarian governance within Western general publics using World Values Survey data from fourteen Western democracies and three recent Latin American Public Opinion Project samples from Canada and the United States. Two key findings emerged. First, cultural conservatism was consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance. Second, within half of the democracies studied, including all of the English-speaking ones, Western citizens holding a protection-based attitude package⸺combining cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes⸺were the most open to authoritarian governance. Within other countries, protection-based and consistently right-wing attitude packages were associated with similarly high levels of openness to authoritarian governance. We discuss implications for radical right populism and the possibility of splitting potentially undemocratic mass coalitions along economic lines.

scholarly journals Who is Open to Authoritarian Governance within Western Democracies?

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ariel Malka ◽  
Yphtach Lelkes ◽  
Bert N. Bakker ◽  
Eliyahu Spivack
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
World Values Survey ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Economic Attitudes ◽  
Cultural Conservatism ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Western Democracies

Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind we explored which ideological groups are most open to authoritarian governance within Western general publics using World Values Survey data from fourteen Western democracies and three recent Latin American Public Opinion Project samples from Canada and the United States. Two key findings emerged. First, cultural conservatism was consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance. Second, within half of the democracies studied, including all of the English-speaking ones, Western citizens holding a protection-based attitude package — combining cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes — were the most open to authoritarian governance. Within other countries, protection-based and consistently right-wing attitude packages were associated with similarly high levels of openness to authoritarian governance. We discuss implications for radical right populism and the possibility of splitting potentially undemocratic mass coalitions along economic lines.

Roads to the Radical Right

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Koen Damhuis
Keyword(s):  
Radical Right ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Unique Material ◽  
Marine Le Pen ◽  
To Come ◽  
National Perspective ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
Do So ◽  
Cross National

Trump, Wilders, Salvini, Le Pen—during the last decades, radical right-wing leaders and their parties have become important political forces in most Western democracies. Their growing appeal raises an increasingly relevant question: who are the voters that support them and why do they do so? Numerous and variegated answers have been given to this question, inside as well as outside academia. Yet, curiously, despite their quantity and diversity, these existing explanations are often based on a similar assumption: that of homogeneous electorates. Consequently, the idea that different subgroups with different profiles and preferences might coexist within the constituencies of radical right-wing parties has thus far remained underdeveloped, both theoretically and empirically. This ground-breaking book is the first one that systematically investigates the heterogeneity of radical right-wing voters. Theoretically, it introduces the concept of electoral equifinality to come to grips with this diversity. Empirically, it relies on innovative statistical analyses and no less than 125 life-history interviews with voters in France and the Netherlands. Based on this unique material, the study identifies different roads to the radical right and compares them within a cross-national perspective. In addition, through an analysis of almost 1,400 tweets posted by Geert Wilders and Marine Le Pen, the book shows how the latter are able to appeal to different groups of voters. Taken together, the book thus provides a host of ground-breaking insights into the heterogeneous phenomenon of radical right support.

The Alt-Right

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Hawley
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
White Identity ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Conservative Movement ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Clear Explanation ◽  
Racial Polarization

In recent years, the so-called Alt-Right, a white nationalist movement, has grown at an alarming rate. Taking advantage of high levels of racial polarization, the Alt-Right seeks to normalize explicit white identity politics. Growing from a marginalized and disorganized group of Internet trolls and propagandists, the Alt-Right became one of the major news stories of the 2016 presidential election. Discussions of the Alt-Right are now a regular part of political discourse in the United States and beyond. In The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know® , George Hawley, one of the world's leading experts on the conservative movement and right-wing radicalism, provides a clear explanation of the ideas, tactics, history, and prominent figures of one of the most disturbing movements in America today. Although it presents itself as a new phenomenon, the Alt-Right is just the latest iteration of a longstanding radical right-wing political tradition. The Alt-Right represents a genuine challenge to pluralistic liberal democracy, but its size and influence are often exaggerated. Whether intentionally or not, President Donald Trump energized the Alt-Right in 2016, yet conflating Trump's variety of right-wing politics with the Alt-Right causes many observers to both overestimate the Alt-Right's size and downplay its radicalism. Hawley provides a tour of the contemporary radical right, and explains how it differs from more mainstream varieties of conservatism. In dispassionate and accessible language, he orients readers to this disruptive and potentially dangerous political moment.

Petitions to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario from Local Governments, 1867–1877: A Case Study in Legislative Participation

1993 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-180
Author(s):  
Mary M. P. Stokes
Keyword(s):  
Local Governments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Democratic Revolution ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Marginal Mode ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
Constitutional Changes

In late twentieth-century English-speaking western democracies, the petition is almost exclusively a sporadic, exceptional, and marginal mode of political expression, its legitimacy as an instrument and indicator of public opinion superceded by elected professionals and ubiquitous polls; a tenuous survival from its origin as the universal form of civic supplication. Part and parcel of the democratic revolution that reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, this transition may not have been neatly contemporaneous with the constitutional changes to which it seems collateral. In a recent article in this review, David C. Frederick posited that petitioning effectively disappeared in the United States after the imposition of a “gag-rule” by Congress, imposed in the 1830s as a response to anti-slavery agitation by petition.

Lying press: Three levels of perceived media bias and their relationship with political preferences

2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jakob-Moritz Eberl
Keyword(s):  
Online Survey ◽  
Media Exposure ◽  
Media Bias ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Media System ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
System Bias ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Western Democracies

Abstract In the context of decreasing media trust as well as the rise of populist movements in many Western Democracies, this study sets out to revisit the relationship between political preferences and perceived media bias. It investigates perceived bias of the entire media system, the perceived bias of individual outlets as well as perceived beneficiaries of this favorable coverage. Analyses are based on an online survey in Austria in 2015 (n ~ 1,679) and compare citizens’ perceived biases towards eight newspapers and television outlets. Results show that media system bias in Austria is strongly related to right-wing but not to left-wing extremism. Furthermore, there are not only differences between single outlets but also between media genres, as particularly tabloids are less afflicted by right-wing perceptions of bias. Finally, there is evidence of hostile media perceptions irrespective of actual media exposure.

scholarly journals The Western Populist Right in 2020: A Purported Clash Between the Public Good and Individual Rights

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chiara Migliori
Keyword(s):  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Right ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
State Apparatus ◽  
Western Democracies

The discourse revolving on the protection and enhancement of supposedly imperiled individual rights is a fixture of conservative actors across western democracies. The Covid19 pandemic represented an occasion for such actors to increase the deployment of said discourse, in order to lament citizens’ rights curtailments on the part of an intrusive state apparatus. This presentation focuses on the cases of Italy and the United States to highlight similarities and differences of the exploitation of the rights talk from crucial right-wing political actors and supportive media or interest groups. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have witnessed an exponentially growing deployment of the narrative based on allegedly threatened religious freedom and freedom of speech. These claims, analyzed in conjunction with the populist, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist agendas of such political actors, cast a light on a transnational populist religious right whose development should be closely monitored.

Venezuela's Oil Wealth and Social Transformation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dario Azzellini
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Bolivarian Revolution ◽  
Eu Countries ◽  
Oil Wealth ◽  
The Right

With the victory of Hugo Chávez in the 1998 presidential elections, Venezuela became the first country in the Latin American “pink tide.” Up to then, mainstream political analysis had considered Venezuela a stable liberal democracy. Little attention had been paid to the country internationally. Former army officer Chávez was met with suspicion by the international left, which knew little about the Venezuelan left and the contemporary history of the country, and the right thought it could persuade him to act in its interests. The process of social transformation launched, named the “Bolivarian Revolution” after Venezuelan independence leader Simón Bolivar, became radicalized rapidly and was soon declared socialist. Internal policies were characterized by popular participation, expropriations, and redistribution of the oil wealth. Internationally, Venezuela took an active role in promoting regional integration and South–South cooperation. Chávez and the social transformation process in Venezuela rapidly gained strong sympathies among social movements and the radical left throughout the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region; for the same reasons, Venezuela came to be the number-one enemy of the Latin American right and the United States, which supported several attempts to overthrow the government. After Chávez’s death in 2013, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, faced an increasingly violent opposition, a severe economic crisis, growing hostility from the United States and the European Union (EU), and a regional context in which the rise of right-wing governments reversed the “pink tide.” Since early 2019, the situation has escalated because of sanctions by the U.S. and EU countries; the recognition of a self-proclaimed “interim president” belonging to the opposition, by the United States, most EU countries, and the right-wing governments in Latin America; coup attempts; and the open threat of U.S. military intervention. The unfolding of the Bolivarian Revolution, the forces at play, and the main points of conflict need to be analyzed in their historical context.

The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Electoral Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
To Come

The resurgence of strong radical right-wing parties and movements constitutes one of the most significant political changes in democratic states during the past several decades, particularly in Europe. This resurgence has attracted interest from political scientists, sociologists, historians, and other scholars, most of whose research focuses on party and electoral politics. This book covers that literature, focuses on how the radical right manifests itself as movements rather than parties, and include a number of case studies both in Europe and beyond. The chapters cover concepts and definitions; ideologies and discourses; a range of contemporary issues including religion, globalization, gender, and activism; and cases such as France, Russia, the United States, Australia, Israel, and Japan. By integrating various strands of scholarship on the radical right, the book provides an authoritative and state-of-the-art overview of the topic and sets the agenda for future scholarship on the radical right for years to come.

scholarly journals Center-Right Political Parties in Advanced Democracies

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noam Gidron ◽  
Daniel Ziblatt
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Comparative Research ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Radical Right ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Full Account ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Mass Attitudes ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
Advanced Democracies

This review proposes a comparative research agenda on center-right parties in advanced democracies, bringing together research in American and comparative politics. Political scientists have recently closely examined the decline of the center-left and the rise of the radical right but have paid less attention to the weakening of center-right parties. Yet cohesive center-right parties have facilitated political stability and compromises, while their disintegration has empowered radical challengers. After presenting an overview of right-wing politics in Western democracies and weighing different definitions of the electoral right, we discuss two factors that shape variations in center-right cohesion: organizational robustness of center-right partisan institutions and the (un)bundling of conservative mass attitudes on different policy dimensions. Last, we argue that a full account of the rise of the radical right cannot focus solely on the strategies of the center-left but must incorporate also the choices, opportunities, and constraints of center-right parties.

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