In this lecture Cas Mudde will provide a short overview of the three waves of scholarship on populist radical right parties, before critically assessing the progress made in recent research by focusing on four key aspects: scope, data and method, causes, and consequences. His main argument is that, although the scope of scholarship has finally moved beyond the usual suspects, meaning that more issues and parties are studied today, theoretical innovation, particularly with regard to explanations of the electoral success of populist radical right parties, has been marginal since the mid-1990s. Moreover, studies of party effects remain limited in number and scope, focusing mainly on immigration policies. Hence, it is time for a fourth wave, Mudde argues, which more explicitly acknowledges and theorizes the diversity within the far right party family, and goes beyond the paradigm of the outsider-challenger party.
Cas Mudde is an Associate Professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia (USA) and a Researcher at the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX) at the University of Oslo (Norway). Since July 2015 he is co-editor of the European Journal of Political Research (EJPR), the flagship journal of the European Consortium for Political Research.
He publishes broadly on politics in Europe, Israel, and North America with a particular focus on (the interaction between) extremism and democracy. His books Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe and Populism in Europe and the Americas: Corrective or Threat for Democracy?, which have been published in English by Cambridge University Press and in Greek by Epikentro. The former won the Stein Rokkan Prize in 2008 and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice. His recent books are Political Extremism (SAGE, 2014, 4 Volumes), Youth and the Extreme Right (IDEBATE, 2014) and ΣΥΡΙΖΑ: Η διάψευση της λαϊκιστικής υπόσχεσης (Epikentro, 2015). His forthcoming books are On Extremism and Democracy in Europe (Routledge, 2016) and The Contemporary Far Right: A Reader (Routledge, 2016).