In one of the opening scenes in the movie Brexit (2019), Dominic Cummings (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) finds himself in a pub conducting “focus groups” in search of a slogan for the campaign to leave the European Union. Cummings probes for resentments against the EU until he lands the key question: “It is immigration? Is it immigration? You can be honest, is it immigration?” The patrons agree that it is. To be sure, Cummings uncovers other gripes against cultural change, such as that people seem to have less religious faith and are getting married less often. But these prove to be tangential concerns to a target population that links European Union membership to uncontrolled immigration. What was supposed to be a campaign about the economic costs and benefits of the EU became one about race and ethnicity instead (Clarke, Goodwin, and Whiteley, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union, 2017).

The two books reviewed here reach an analogous conclusion about the last quarter-century of European party politics. Neither, however, do so intentionally. Erik Tillman’s Authoritarianism and the Evolution of West European Electoral Politics posits that authoritarianism, which, following the psychological literature, he defines as “an individual predisposition towards the maintenance of group uniformity, cohesion, and authority at the expense of individual autonomy and diversity” (pp. 24-5) is more or less normally distributed across West European electorates. Low authoritarians (think Green voters) and high authoritarians have always existed, but whereas in the past class mediated this basic cleavage over the nature of political authority, the combination of value and demographic change over the last four decades have made it so salient that Tillman, drawing on Hetherington and Weiler (Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, 2009), claims that a “worldview evolution” is under way in Europe as well as the United States. What this means is that “authoritarianism increasingly structures political behaviour in twenty-first-century Western Europe” (p. 40)” Although pieces of Tillman’s argument are familiar, he organizes them in a compelling way and offers an absolute wealth of survey data and analysis, including an original survey experiment in Ireland.

Many interesting conclusions emerge about the “high authoritarians” that are Tillman’s focus, but three deserve mention here. The first is that they do not hold consistent attitudes on economics, and that economic anxieties are not driving them toward radical right parties. (Interestingly, Cummings does not ask one question about economics during his impromptu focus group.) Tillman similarly finds that authoritarians oppose the EU primarily because they view it as a social—and not an economic—threat. A second notable finding is that older voters are not overrepresented among high authoritarians, and as a consequence are not driving support for radical right parties. Tillman reads this as evidence against the cultural backlash hypothesis (Norris and Ingelhart, Cultural Backlash, 2019) which claims that older voters are reacting to value change—what Ingelhart initially referred to as a “silent revolution” from material to post-material values—among younger cohorts. A third finding, more a refrain in the data really, is that what really matters to high authoritarians is not value change in general but changes in the ethnic heterogeneity of European societies specifically.

Tim Bale and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser’s Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis is an edited volume motivated by the proposition that mainstream right parties are caught between Ingelhart’s silent revolution—whereby an increasing share of their affluent voters have adopted progressive social values—and Piero Ignazi’s (1992) “silent counter-revolution” to those very values among another core of the conservative electorate. As several of the contributors point out, there was nothing “silent” about a political counter-revolution that saw the rise of the Austrian Freedom Party and UKIP. Others note that the silent counter-revolution was either muted (Germany), long-delayed (Sweden), or not applicable to their case (Spain). These caveats aside, the conceptual framing is effective in achieving the editors’ main aim of the book, which is to offer a “comprehensive picture of the mainstream right” (p. 28). Even though the mainstream right has been the most powerful and electorally successful party family for decades, political science has pretty much ignored its durability in favor of rising challengers (Greens and the Radical Right) or declining historical adversaries (Social Democrats). The editors provide a useful typology containing three subcategories of the mainstream right: Christian-democratic, conservative, and liberal. In some ways the subtitle of “mainstream right in crisis” only really applies to the Christian Democrats. And even their relative decline should be caveated: the collapse of the Italian Christian Democrats and (to a lesser extent) the Dutch Christian Democrats explains much of the loss. True, support for the German CDU/CSU cratered in the 2022 elections, but that was against a backdrop of seventeen years in power. But whether one views the mainstream right as in crisis or as a remarkable case of electoral and governing endurance, there is an absolute need for this book, and it should appear on graduate syllabi shortly. The editors assembled internationally recognized scholars for the six country cases and two cross-national chapters. In the introduction, the editors identify four key policy challenges that emerge from tension between the two revolutions—European Integration, Immigration, Moral Issues, and Welfare—and invite the contributors to consider if “these four key policy challenges are of equal magnitude, or rather if some of them are proving, for the mainstream right at least, more daunting than others” (p. 22).

The bulk of the volume consists of two cross-national chapters and eight case studies. A chapter on the demand-side finds only mixed support for the proposition that culture is supplanting class in mainstream right voting, and that occupation remains the best predictor. The mainstream right electorate has also been far more stable than the strong theory of electoral realignment contained in the “worldview evolution” perspective. The supply-side chapter leverages comparative manifesto data to show that there has indeed been a general shift within mainstream right parties toward progressive attitudes on moral issues (family, sexuality, gender) as well as toward restrictive positions on immigration. There is thus some support, it seems, for the basic claim that both the silent revolution and the silent counterrevolution are still occurring.

However, when evaluating which of the four policy challenges has been most daunting for the mainstream right, six of the eight case studies conclude that it is immigration by a wide margin. Not surprisingly, the most daunting policy challenge in Great Britain is (or now was) the relationship with the European Union. Perhaps less expectedly, in Spain it is the tension over the welfare state that has proved most difficult for the mainstream right, although the recent appearance of a far-right challenger (VOX) after decades of inactivity may come to rival it. In the six other cases (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden), country experts conclude that immigration has clearly been the main policy challenge for the mainstream right.

Taken together, both books therefore find that it is not a general cultural backlash but primarily a nativist backlash that is driving electoral realignment in the post Lipset–Rokkan world. Part of the issue is that Ingelhart did not include immigration in his initial formulation of value change, and updates to the theory have varied from giving it equal importance to treating it as one of several components of post-materialism. Tillman, for example, begins from the assumption that both value and demographic change drive worldview evolution, but then finds overwhelming evidence that it is demographic change—and specifically the changing ethnic composition of society as opposed to its age profile—that is doing most of the work. The British Conservatives under Cameron and the German Christian Democrats “modernized” their positions on moral issues considerably, and even some radical right parties have adopted progressive social values such as sexual tolerance, although such claims are embedded in an Islamophobic agenda. The culture wars of the United States have not been reproduced to any meaningful extent in Western Europe (although they have absolutely done so in Hungary and Poland).

One of the most laudable features of both works is that they address the question of “what does this all mean for democracy in Europe?” The worldview evolution perspective suggests that partisan lines are now following basic psychological orientations about politics and society, which seems a recipe for increased polarization. High authoritarians and low authoritarians increasingly talk past one another or refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the other side’s view of the meaning of politics and society. In the conclusion, Bale and Kaltwasser wonder if greater fissures might appear over the meaning of democracy, particularly when, in their view, some radical right parties can only be considered “semi-loyal,” in the Linzian sense, to democratic order. Both of these books were published before January 6, 2021, and certainly the origins of both projects predate the Capitol Insurrection by many years. But both point out that democracy in Western Europe, like democracy in the United States, is not an immutable force. Hard as it is for Europeans to imagine the peaceful transfer of power being interrupted by violent means in their own states, it would be remiss for them to dismiss it as American exceptionalism and fail to prepare for this contingency.