The two volumes under review challenge some crucial (mis)conceptions about radical right and populist politics today. In Neoliberal Nationalism, Christian Joppke examines how neoliberalism and neonationalism constitute mutually supportive processes rather than opposing ones in the Global North. In Roads to the Radical Right, Koen Damhuis illustrates the heterogeneous constituencies of these parties, rejecting the idea of an “archetypical” voter, focusing on France and the Netherlands.

To disentangle the neoliberalism–neonationalism nexus and the tensions between them, Joppke contends that a fertile breeding ground for the nativist campaigns of radical right populist parties (RRPPs) has been provided by the neoliberal order’s enhancement of the workings of free market capitalism (chap. 2). He argues that, somewhat paradoxically, today’s highly deregulated and open economic systems also rely on exclusionary requirements for immigration and citizenship. The author summarizes these contemporary restrictive trends under the concept of “earned citizenship”; suppress a citizenship that is neither ethnic (primordial) nor civic (cultural) but is based on the notions of individual merit configuring a “privilege” rather than a “right” that is “harder to get but also easier to lose” (chap. 3). In this interpretation, nationalism offers the benefit of protection against the openness of the neoliberal market.

Joppke illustrates his argument by combining evidence from an impressive amount of secondary literature and existing legislation on migration and citizenship in Europe, Canada, and the United States. The core of the empirical investigation lays out a dual trend in immigration policy in the neoliberal age: “courting” high-skilled migrants and “fending off” all sorts of presumably low-skilled migrants, including family migrants. He elaborates on this by focusing on the cases of Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, and Germany’s responses to the 2014 EU asylum policy crisis that, in his understanding, exemplify different ways in which the nationalism–neoliberalism nexus is articulated. The author suggests that although immigration was central to both Brexit and Trump, it acted in different ways. Brexit is mostly about hostility toward EU migrants, and for this reason it will not challenge the structure of (neo)liberal immigration policies. Somewhat paradoxically, it may ultimately make British policy more universalistic, because it will be free from favoritism toward Europeans. By contrast, Trump’s travel ban—suspending the issuance of immigrant and non-immigrant visas to applicants from Muslim-majority countries such as Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, and Yemen, plus North Korea and Venezuela—breaks with liberal immigration policy, whereas Germany represents an interesting case of an obstinately open approach. In the conclusion, Jopkke situates changing immigration and citizenship policies in the broader context of the crisis of liberalism, defending Fukuyama’s idea that liberalism is without alternatives today and pointing at a trade-off between solidarity and diversity in Western societies (chap. 4).

Although the reader may or may not agree with these general conclusions, this is an extremely well-researched and thought-provoking investigation. The overview and engagement with contemporary scholarship on radical right populism and immigration are comprehensive. Such an exhaustive account complements both available literature on RRPPs that has predominantly focused on electoral campaigns (e.g., see Pietro Castelli Gattinara, “The Study of the Far Right and Its Three E’s,” French Politics, 18, 2020) and the political economy literature on neoliberalism, which has acknowledged that “the neoliberal state needs nationalism of a certain sort to survive” (David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2005, p. 85), without however specifying the nature of nationalism. Yet, such an extensive discussion also reveals two critical elements that could be developed further and will certainly inspire future research.

To begin with, Neoliberal Nationalism overlooks the diversity that persists within the category of “the migrant,” referring selectively to examples drawn from specific groups and lacking categories distinguishing among distinct groups on which the author builds his argument; for instance, refugees and Muslim immigrants. One is thus left wondering how the differences that set apart these groups, in the way they are treated in public debates and in immigration policy among other things, can be integrated into Joppke’s overall argument. Does the nationalism–neoliberalism nexus play out the same way for refugees and economic migrants or for first- and second-generation migrants?

In a similar vein, the reader is left wondering why the neoliberal order would have to rely on right-wing populism when similar policy outcomes have been obtained, over the last 30 years at least, through the workings of mainstream conservatives and social democratic parties. Although Joppke discusses the role of social democratic parties in changing migration policies during the neoliberal era (pp. 17–30), it remains unclear whether this is a story about the mainstreaming of the radical right or about the radicalization of the political mainstream. Ultimately, the neoliberal logic requiring migrants to “contribute” rather than being “parasites,” although it echoes identity requests of the radical right, also blends well with the electoral strategies of mainstream parties concerned about the electoral fortunes of the radical right (see Sanna Salo and Jens Rydgren, The Battle over Working-Class Voters, 2021). Although there is ample research conducted by scholars of extremism and democracy on the mainstreaming of the radical right (see Cas Mudde, The Far Right Today, 2019), research shedding light on the radicalization of mainstream parties is still in its infancy, and Joppke’s volume is an early foray into a very promising research agenda.

With Roads to the Radical Right, Koen Damhuis makes an important contribution to the study of radical right populism and elections in Europe, by challenging the idea of an “archetypical” voter of RRPPs. Throughout this volume he proposes a range of theoretical and empirical arguments to account for the variation in support for RRPPs, including ideology, sociodemographic profiles, and grievances. Overall, Damhuis develops an accessible and readable investigation of heterogeneity in RRPP constituencies. The book’s major contributions lie in its empirical qualitative material (125 life-history interviews with voters) and in the author’s “thesis of electoral equifinality” (chap. 2) to account for variation in the preferences of RRPP voters. This thesis claims that different demands, ideological leanings, and sociodemographic backgrounds might equally lead to support for the radical right. In other words, different subgroups with different profiles and preferences coexist among RRPP electorates.

Five chapters of the volume are devoted to the empirical analyses (chaps. 4–7 and 8) showing that three main groups of voters with different social backgrounds support the PVV and the FN/RN in the Netherlands and France, respectively: individuals with lower incomes (mostly unskilled workers), voters from the “hardworking” (lower) middle class, and a group of radical conservatives from the wealthier section of the population. Damhuis illustrates that people in socially weaker positions and with lower incomes are primarily motivated by a feeling of relative deprivation in comparison to refugees and newcomers, notably with respect to social housing and elderly care. They feel that migrants are prioritized by the political parties in power. Meanwhile, voters from the (lower) middle class (such as self-employed and private sector employees) support RRPPs because they believe they themselves contribute too much to the nation’s wealth and voice concerns about outgroups that contrast with their work ethic (such as the “lazy Greeks”). The third group of voters includes people who are highly educated and mostly vote based on ideological considerations: Damhuis labels them “radical conservatives.” Members of this third group oppose progressive value change in societies and the loss of cultural roots that they particularly associate with what they consider to be the growing influence of Islam.

Road to the Radical Right offers an enhanced understanding of the variation in national constituencies based on rich data in France and the Netherlands. It thus provides a promising comparative research agenda for scholars and students of elections, the radical right, and populism. Damhuis successfully debunks the simplistic idea that voters of RRPPs are homogeneous and makes an impressive theoretical and empirical effort to deconstruct and critique their simplified social representation often conveyed by the media. Still, the author does not always situate this work exhaustively in relation to some important classic and emerging research on the same theme. For example, almost 20 years ago, Nonna Mayer (Ces Français qui Votent Le Pen, 2002) already distinguished between “ninistes” (those who feel neither left nor right) and “droitistes” (right-wing–oriented voters) among radical right electorates. Similarly, Elizabeth Ivarsflaten (“The Vulnerable Populist Right Parties,” European Journal of Political Research, 44 [3], 2005) demonstrated that those most likely to vote for RRPPS are from different occupational groups with opposing occupational preferences: blue-collar workers who support extensive state intervention in the economy, and the owners of small businesses who are against such state intervention. How does the “thesis of electoral equifinality” innovate, complement, or challenge these findings? Similarly, some of Damhuis’s results are in line with the recent literature on the use of producerism in the campaigns of RRPPs (see Gilles Ivaldi and Oscar Mazzoleni, “Economic Populism and Producerism,” Populism, 2 [1], 2020); namely, the idea that the “producers” of the nation’s wealth should be the only ones to enjoy the fruits of their own labors. How do producerist ideas resonate with “heterogeneous” voters? Here the question to be clarified is whether producerism opens a novel path toward the radical right, set by grievances and calling for an alternative model of particularistic redistribution of wealth and resources, restricted to the community of producers. Finally, future comparative research could also clarify whether (and why) heterogeneity is just a characteristic of radical right populist constituencies and not of other political families too and perhaps exploring the relative weight of different demands, ideological leanings, and sociodemographic trends.

Neoliberal Nationalism and Roads to the Radical Right have much to say to ongoing academic and societal debates on how contemporary democracies can deal with radical right politics and manage internal diversity and economic inequality, often pitted as a choice between openness and closure, neoliberalism and state interventionism. Overall, Joppke’s and Damhuis’s discussions of how RRPPs incorporate neoliberal messages into their nativist campaigns and appeal to heterogeneous constituencies deepen the scholarly understanding of radical right politics and the changing relationship between nationalism and representative democracy.