Oppositional identity politics: Towards a new concept

A growing literature in political science argues that the rise of far right parties — and the contrast they strike with left-libertarian and green parties — amounts to the formation of a new cleavage in Western European politics. Yet the contemporary far right differs from ‘classic’ cleavage-based mass parties in two fundamental ways. First, far right parties have heterogenous electorates, comprising voters with wide-ranging sociodemographic profiles. Second, and relatedly, far right parties’ electorates do not have a cohesive organizational basis outside of the electoral arena, a characteristic element of historic mass parties. This paper argues that these divergences are significant, and reflective of a fundamental difference in outsider party mobilization strategies: while some parties seek to mobilize voters primarily on the basis of a shared ingroup identity, other parties seek to mobilize voters on the basis of their opposition to outgroups. While the former strategy aligns with classic models of cleavage politics, the latter approach represents a catch-all, ‘non-cleavage’ mode of outsider political articulation, also employed historically by interwar fascist parties. Building on the author’s previous work, this paper develops a concept of “oppositional identity politics” to describe this form of outgroup-focused political mobilization and discusses its application to the contemporary far right. The paper concludes by considering the implications of the concept for new cleavage theories of European politics.