MOVEMENT PARTIES OF THE FAR RIGHT: THE ORGANIZATION AND STRATEGIES OF NATIVIST COLLECTIVE ACTORS*
The scholarship on the far right has often interpreted nativist organizations as straddling the conceptual space between party and movement. These groups contest elections in order to gain representation in office, yet they also seek to mobilize public support to engage contentious issues like social movements. Despite theoretical commonalities, very little empirical research has focused on far-right “movement parties” as collective actors operating both in the protest and the electoral arenas. The article redresses this inconsistency by exploring the organizational and strategic configuration of two far-right collective actors—the Hungarian Jobbik and the Italian CasaPound. Deploying original interviews with high-ranking officials, the analysis enhances our understanding of the internal “supply side” of the far right as well as empirical knowledge on hybrid organizations that emerge from grassroots activism and successively organize to pursue the electoral option.
Contributor Notes
* Andrea L.P. Pirro is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence. Pietro Castelli Gattinara is assistant professor at the Centre for Research on Extremism (C-REX), University of Oslo. Please direct correspondence to Andrea L.P. Pirro, at: andrea.pirro@sns.it.
†Earlier drafts of this article were presented in the workshop, “A Closely Coupled Tango? Interactions between Electoral and Protest Politics,” at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Joint Sessions of Workshops, University of Nottingham, 25–30 April 2017, and at the C-REX Internal Seminar, University of Oslo, 13 March 2018. We would like to thank the participants to these events, Lorenzo Mosca, Lorenzo Zamponi, as well as the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on our work.