Book Review: C Mudde (ed.), The Populist Radical Right: A Reader
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918819166 |
| Published date | 01 November 2019 |
| Date | 01 November 2019 |
| Author | Erik Gahner Larsen |
| Subject Matter | Commissioned Book Reviews |
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(4) NP4 –NP5
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Commissioned Book Review
819166PSW0010.1177/1478929918819166Political Studies ReviewCommissioned Book Review
book-review2019
Commissioned Book Review
The Populist Radical Right: A Reader by
C Mudde (ed.). Abingdon: Routledge, 2017.
642 pp., £84.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781138673861
The Brexit referendum and the US presidential
election in 2016 sparked an increased interest
in the contemporary populist radical right. The
public, pundits and politicians alike discuss the
role of populism in democratic politics today,
and with a comprehensive scholarly literature
on the topic, it can seem cumbersome to
become familiar with the decades of research
on one of the most popular party families
today, the populist radical right.
For the people interested in a better under-
standing of the populist radical right, a solid
entry point to the academic literature is the
voluminous volume, The Populist Radical
Right: A Reader, edited by Cas Mudde. Cas
Mudde is one of the leading researchers on the
populist radical right and, with an immense
knowledge of the literature, there is no doubt
that Mudde is able to provide an extensive
introduction to the literature.
The book in question is a collection of 32
previously published journal articles and book
chapters handpicked by the editor. The contribu-
tions span a period of 25 years, from Klaus von
Beyme’s article on right-wing extremism in
post-war Europe, published in 1988, to recent
studies published in 2013. The 32 chapters have
for the most part survived the test of time and
seem, in many cases, more important for our
understanding of politics today than when the
contributions were initially published.
The chapters are distributed across six the-
matic parts: (1) ideology and issues, (2) parties,
organisations and subcultures, (3) leaders,
members and voters, (4) causes, (5) conse-
quences and (6) responses. The first and sec-
ond parts consist of contributions on how to
study the ideological make-up of the radical
right, the different political issues the populist
radical right parties deal with and its organisa-
tional expressions. The third and fourth parts
consist of contributions interested in the people
involved in and supporting the radical right,
that is, the politicians/leaders, the members
and last but not least, the voters. The fifth and
sixth parts focus in particular on how radical
right parties matter for parliamentary and gov-
ernmental dynamics, including their implica-
tions for the policymaking process.
The six parts provide substantial variation
in the content and topics being covered. You
will find everything from philosophical discus-
sions on key concepts to descriptive evidence
on the evolution of radical right parties; from
detailed historical descriptions to large-N sta-
tistical analyses; from analyses of racist organ-
isations such as the Ku Klux Klan to analyses
of contemporary right-wing parties in Europe.
The book is, in other words, an impressive and
pluralistic collection of authoritative texts on
the populist radical right. Furthermore, each
part begins with a brief outline of the chapters
to come, a series of revision questions to each
chapter, some discussion points and sugges-
tions for further reading. The revision ques-
tions and discussion points will serve as a
useful resource for teachers when designing
modules on the populist radical right in the
future.
However, the strength of the individual
chapters is also the main limitation of the book.
Specifically, the literature on the populist radi-
cal right relates to notoriously difficult terms
and there is no unified theoretical framework
guiding the individual chapters. To be fair, the
limitation is present in the literature and is sim-
ply a limitation in this volume as well. As the
editor acknowledges in the introduction,
almost every author in the volume uses a some-
what different term, definition and classifica-
tion of the populist radical right. This is
especially symptomatic for a collection of con-
tributions spanning over two decades in a
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