Movement parties of the far right: Understanding nativist mobilisation

Traditional political parties are on the wane. Newer populist and far-right collective actors, conversely, are exerting ever-growing influence on the public sphere and political participation. The fortunes of the latter are often tightly linked to the introduction of unconventional methods into politics. A fundamental but critically neglected component of this strategy rests in combining activities in the protest and electoral arenas. Why and how does the far right engage in non-institutional politics? This project contends that such decisions depend on the far right’s capacity to enhance social movement qualities. The study thus focuses on a specific subset of populist and far-right actors, i.e. ‘movement parties’ that run for public office like political parties but uphold the seemingly looser organisational structures, decision-making procedures, and mobilisation practices of social movements. Specifically, this project offers the first systematic, mixed-methods analysis of the twofold engagement in electoral and non-electoral politics by the European far right. It does so using an original protest event dataset (Far-Right Protest in Europe, FARPE) to measure the size and nature of far-right mobilisation quantitatively and longitudinally, combined with social network analysis as well as semi-structured interviews with high-ranking officials, to uncover the backstage of nativist collective action in nine East and West European countries. By tackling the motives and strategies of movement parties, this project casts light on the mechanisms driving the electoral consolidation of the far right and its return to street politics.