According to Cas Mudde, the vast (and still expanding) academic literature on radical right parties in Europe has too often relied on fuzzy conceptualization, unproven assumptions, and poor-quality secondary data. His new book seeks to review, clarify, and critique this literature and to introduce a pan-European perspective, examining the radical right in both Western Europe and Eastern Europe in a single framework. The book breaks down into three principal sections addressing the conceptualization and categorization of the populist radical right, its ideological character, and the explanation of (some) radical right parties' success.

Mudde first seeks to clarify the nature of parties variously labeled “populist,” “radical right” “extreme–right,” “anti-immigrant,” and “ultranationalist.” To avoid the sociological determinism prevalent in much of the literature—which reduces parties to the sociodemographic characteristics of their electorates or underlying social trends shaping voter preferences—he builds a typology centering on parties and shared official ideological positions. After reviewing concept formation strategies, Mudde argues that the core group of parties at issue is best defined as “populist radical right” (PRR) because they combine populism with ideologies of nativism and social authoritarianism. This categorization excludes not only elitist far-right groups in the neofascist tradition and traditionalist conservative Christian parties, but also groupings such as the Scandinavian progress parties and Forza Italia, which—despite anti-immigrant stances—Mudde sees as having “neoliberal populist” ideologies. His categorization largely picks out such “usual suspects” as France's Front National (FN), the Vlaams Blok (VB) in Belgium, and Vladimír Zhirinovsky's misnamed Liberal Democratic Party in Russia (LDPR), but also, surprisingly, includes such parties as Northern Ireland's Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Croatia Democratic Union (HDZ). Other parties sometimes studied under the rubric of radical right populism, such as Vladimír Mečiar's Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) or Italy's “postfascist” National Alliance (AN)—now a conventional conservative party in Mudde's view—are, however, excluded.

Central to the ideological identity of PRR parties, Mudde argues, is the well-known identification of outsider groups—immigrants, national minorities, cosmopolitan intellectuals, drug users, gays and lesbians, Jews, Muslims, Roma—as threats to the state or nation. Like earlier authors on exclusionary radical right populism, such as Paul Taggart or Hans-Georg Betz, Mudde sees this framing of politics as implying an illiberal, ethnocentric, majoritarian model of democracy with plebiscitary elements, diluted checks and balances, and weak minority rights, rather than outright rejection of democracy. However, he challenges the views of feminist scholars who interpret the radical right as a uniquely male-dominated and misogynistic political movement, as well as the parallel arguments of political scientists such as Betz or Hebert Kitschelt and Anthony McGann, who see it as representing a fusion of chauvinism and neoliberalism formed in reaction to the mobilization of left-libertarian social movements and parties. Although PRR parties draw on disproportionately male electorates, women are no more underrepresented there than in those of the conventional right, and though socially conservative, many PRR parties take what Mudde terms a “modern traditional” (p. 93) view of the role of women as centered on, but not restricted to, home and family. Moreover, PRR parties generally favor, not economic neoliberalism, but a “nativist economy” in which market forces serve the national community and have free play only within local or national boundaries.

Unsurprisingly, PRR parties are in the vanguard of euroskepticism. However, like some more mainstream right-wing parties, many have moved to anti-European Union positions relatively recently, and most see the need for some alternative form of European cooperation. Radical right “Europeanism” has, however, produced no durable organizational expression or PRR “europarty.” PRR parties, Mudde also notes, have an underlying hostility to globalization, although this is a major preoccupation only for parties with strongly anti-American attitudes.

Overall, Mudde argues, comparative studies seeking to explain PRR success have proved inconclusive. Many of the dozens of books and articles that have appeared in the last three decades have taken a demand-side approach to PRR parties, seeking to identify the social conditions that form the perfect breeding ground for them. However, taken together, Mudde finds such demand-side analyses contradictory due to vague or inconsistent conceptualization and a failure adequately to theorize linkages between macro social structures and individual voting decisions. Long-term shifts in values and changes in class structures are, moreover, common to most advanced postindustrial societies and thus offer little explanation for cross-national variation in radical right parties' electoral support or for the sudden electoral surges that frequently characterize their development. Supply-side factors, such as national political opportunity structures, Mudde thinks, can explain why some PRR parties make electoral breakthroughs. However, formal institutions such as electoral systems seem less important than the role of the media and historically rooted far-right or radical nationalist subcultures. The subsequent crucial phase of PRR party consolidation in the national party system is, however, driven by internal organizational factors, such as PRR leaders' skills as party managers, strategists, and media performers and the creation of effective propaganda machines.

In addition to more primary research and better conceptualization, a paradigm shift is also required, according to the author. The radical right should, he suggests, no longer be regarded as “normal pathology” of liberal democracy reflecting the strains and crises induced by sociocultural modernization. Instead, it should be seen as “pathological normalcy,” representing in more radicalized and extreme form many widely held beliefs and insecurities. The real question, he concludes, is not why the radical right parties have so much electoral support, but why their electoral support is not far larger.

Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe offers a lucid, supremely well-informed overview of a sprawling, complex literature and a penetrating, if overstated, critique of its accumulated insights. The book is at its strongest in its incisive discussion of concept formation and categorization and its provocative conclusions on the relationship of the populist radical right to the mainstream of European democracy. Its weaknesses lie in an overconcentration on ideology and the lack of any really effective comparative (re)analysis of its own. Arguments and findings are presented and assessed in broad-brush terms and sometimes rather summarily dismissed through the juxtaposition of two or three variables in simple tabular form. There is also a need for more systematic discussion of variation among PRR parties. This is especially noticeable in the lumping together of West European and East European cases. This makes sense as an exercise in ideological classification and offers a welcome corrective to stereotypes of Eastern Europe as a region riddled with atavistic extremism. However, it obscures the different paths through which PRR parties have emerged in Western and Eastern Europe and the very different party system and social contexts in which they still operate

Mudde is probably correct to argue that in time, much of postcommunist Europe will be transformed into a mere subregion of the developed West. However, such convergence cannot currently be assumed. Greater sensitivity to Europe's different configurations of postindustrial capitalism and democracy would therefore have enhanced the book. Despite such limitations, its critical scope and depth mark it out as a major work offering an indispensable road map for future research on populism and right-wing politics in contemporary Europe.