Uncivil Society and Radical Right Voting

Uncivil Society and Radical Right Voting Uncivil Society and Radical Right Voting There has recently been an explosion of non-state actors advocating nationalist, socially conservative and illiberal values (Caiani and Parenti 2016; Greskovits 2020; Orenstein 2019). However, scholars have noticed that illiberal, extremist movements do not always map onto the strength of radical right parties (Hutter and Kriesi 2013; Minkenberg 2019; Pirro 2010). This makes sense in light of Koopmans (1997), which reminds us that there is a non-trivial relationship between conventional and unconventional political participationvoting and participation in uncivil society do not necessarily go in tandem and can sometimes serve as substitutes (Minkenberg 2015). This means that engagement in uncivil society can sometimes and for some groups replace voting, which is thought to be ineffective. For others, unconventional and conventional mobilization can serve as complements, reinforcing and cross-fertilizing each other. Unfortunately, little is still known about the mechanisms that translate grievances associated with far right, illiberal and extremist ideologies into either electoral participation and/or public support for (and possibly participation in) uncivil society organizations. This project aims to bring these areas of research together in order to shed light on the factors that govern individual behavior in conventional and unconventional political participation, and on the issues and ideologies that differentiate individuals for whom these modes of mobilization are substitutes or complements. Although uncivil society is often informally associated with radical right parties, the actual link has never been established and there is reason to doubt this lay wisdom (Minkenberg 2015). As a result, there is a clear need to systematically study how, why and when citizens interact with and engage in uncivil society, radical right parties and radicalizing mainstream parties. While a global effort to study this phenomenon would be welcome, a large team of researchers and significant financial resources would be required. Nonetheless, we can still make significant progress on advancing our understanding of this issue through a smaller-scale study that covers the same theoretical breadth but does so in a more circumscribed geographic area: the Visegrad Four (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia). This region provides both crosscountry and longitudinal variation, while offering uniformity on other dimensions (EU accession, economic legacies, demographic trends), thus affording the project with important inferential advantages, while drawing most directly on the PI and co-PI's regional expertise.