Among the most distressing features of contemporary politics within many older and nascent democracies is the surge of popular and/or electoral support for radical right political parties (RRPs). Oftentimes referred to as the “new right,” “extreme right,” “neopopulist right,” or other similar labels, these illiberal agents have proliferated especially across Western Europe since the 1980s, precipitating considerable consternation among mainstream political parties and elites wherever they have taken root. Although none are on the threshold of achieving a major electoral breakthrough, RRPs currently exercise influence over public political discourse and/or the policy agenda in most of the major immigrant-receiving countries within the region.

Against the backdrop of this gathering cross-national illiberal phenomenon, Terri Givens's Voting Radical Right in Western Europe and Pippa Norris's Radical Right are among the most enlightening in a spate of recent books to appear on the subject of RRPs (e.g., The Extreme Right in Western Europe, by Elisabeth Carter, 2005; Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, by Piero Ignazi, 2003; Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe, by Cas Mudde, 2006; The Impact of Radical Right-Wing Parties in West European Democracies, by Michelle Hale Williams, 2006). Both volumes wrestle with an especially vexing question: Which factors best explain the varied political fortunes of radical right parties? As Norris pointedly asks (pp. 3–4), why have RRPs gained representation within the national parliaments of many well-established democracies (e.g., Austria, Canada, France, and Norway) and even some new ones (e.g., Chile, Romania, and Russia) while failing to so in others (e.g., Britain, Sweden, and the United States)?

In approaching this puzzle, Norris analytically divides the multitude of scholarly explanations for RRP success into three major schools. The first, which she labels the “sociological approach,” focuses on the “structural trends altering popular demands in mass society, notably developments in the socioeconomic background and political attitudes of the electorate,” which purportedly generate electoral opportunities for new political parties including RRPs (p. 10). A second school emphasizes the dynamics of political party competition and the critical role of supply-side factors, and particularly party agency. It privileges the idea that where mainstream and radical right parties respectively choose to locate themselves along the ideological spectrum largely determines the political success of the latter. Finally, a third school of scholarship focuses on the formal “electoral rules constraining both supply and demand in the regulated marketplace” (p. 11). The starting point of Norris's book is that all of these schools are wanting, with none providing a comprehensive account of the dynamics of the RRP phenomenon.

Utilizing a “most different” research design that culls evidence from the 1996–2001 Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and the 2002 European Social Survey for 39 countries, Norris develops nine theoretical propositions in her introductory chapter that serve as the building blocks of her paradigm for how the rise of cultural protectionism, the breadth of the policy appeal of the radical right, and the direct impact of electoral systems interact in a complex, nuanced, and ultimately case-specific manner to determine the political fortunes of RRPs (p. 32). For most of the remainder of her study, she then methodically scrutinizes the validity of each proposition in pursuing her new strategic agency theory, a theory that adopts an integrated approach whereby “the varying fortunes of the radical right are understood to be the product of the way in which the formal institutional rules set the context of, and thereby interact with, both party supply and public demand in any [given] election” (p. 18). Norris concludes by arguing that the broad “institutional context, particularly electoral rules, affects the electoral strategies that radical right parties adopt to maximize their appeal, and hence the role of ideological cues and populist appeals vary in generating voting support for these parties” (p. 214).

With several important qualifications and caveats, the national-level and cross-sectional international survey evidence within Radical Right yields several counterintuitive and mostly negative findings: The nature of the electoral system influences the size of the radical right's parliamentary representation but not its vote share; the empirical foundations of the new social cleavage thesis are weak; the direction of causality in the relationship between public disillusionment with politics and the ascendancy of the radical right is ambiguous; there is no significant relationship at the aggregate level between the national share of the vote cast for RRPs and/or the number of parliamentary seats it gains and the rates of immigration, asylum seekers, and refugees; and the ideological positioning of mainstream conservative parties poorly explains the cross-national variation that exists in the radical right's political fortunes. Among her other findings, Norris discovers that RRP voters are disproportionately overrepresented among the petite bourgeoisie and among the skilled and unskilled working class (p. 147), a truly disturbing cross-class political coalition.

Like Norris, Givens seeks to explain the puzzling variation in the political success of radical right parties. However, the former study departs from the latter in at least three major ways. First, Radical Right employs a “most similar systems” research design, exclusively drawing its evidence, including political elite interview data, from the Austrian, Danish, French, and German cases. Second, it is far less ambitious and comprehensive in scrutinizing the existing competing paradigms that purport to explain the variation in RRP success. Finally, although it carefully weighs the socioeconomic evidence for the RRP vote, it is less concerned with rigorously testing the new social cleavage thesis. As a result, Voting Radical Right is less global, figuratively and literally, than Radical Right in its approach to the RRP puzzle.

This said, Givens's central argument—that radical right parties have difficulty attracting voters and winning seats in electoral systems that encourage strategic voting and/or strategic coordination by mainstream parties—at least partly dovetails with Norris's findings. Specifically, both authors agree that electoral systems and electoral rules are crucial, albeit insufficient, factors in circumscribing the ability of radical right parties to gain parliamentary representation. Both conclude that depending on the nature of the electoral system, there are more or less optimal political and ideological strategies that RRPs can realistically pursue. Where the two books conspicuously diverge is when Givens insists that strategic voting—that is, voters supporting a political party other than their preferred choice for fear of wasting their vote—is an important variable in explaining the RRP vote (p. 17). This argument directly contradicts Norris's finding that the “wasted vote” thesis is unsupported by the evidence (p. 125).

How to explain these divergent conclusions? One obvious possible explanation is that the different research designs of the two books and the Radical Right's embrace of far more country cases and political parties are primarily responsible. Another, more pregnant possibility is that the two books may not be examining quite the same political phenomenon. On this score Givens's study, founded on her analysis of several long-established and well-chronicled radical right parties, is perhaps more on the mark than Norris's book with its dozens of parties drawn from 39 countries, including cases as dissimilar as Korea and Sweden. While there is much to be said about the value of large-n studies, of which Radical Right is obviously a very fine example, considerable understanding is compromised by casting the net of radical right parties so broadly that it captures a set of political actors that is excessively diverse. Although Givens's description of RRPs (p. 20), with its emphasis on their tendency to oppose immigration and immigrant settlement, is narrow, the parties included in Voting Radical Right better fit within the universe of actors that have hitherto been recognized by most established scholars of RRPs. This is not to say, of course, that RRPs are exclusively or necessarily a contemporary West European political phenomenon. It is nevertheless true that these political actors were originally defined and are still predominantly situated within a West European political context. It is certainly no coincidence that both books prominently display a photo of Jean Marie Le Pen on their outside cover. In so doing, each seems to acknowledge implicitly that Le Pen's Front National, a very French and European political party, is a classic, indeed perhaps the quintessential, radical right party.

Whatever their differences, both books make a unique and valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on RRPs. For Radical Right, it is the construction of an original, plausible, and comprehensive theory of the variation in the political success of RRPs. For Voting Radical Right, it is the definition of a more regionally anchored model that closely adheres to the conventional scholarly wisdom on RRPs. Which is superior? Ultimately, it comes down to one's definition of the concept of radical right party. A more exclusive definition favors Givens's model, while a more expansive one privileges Norris's paradigm.

To their credit, both authors at various points in their respective analysis acknowledge the limitations of their data and, hence, the need for further research. Perhaps a useful starting point of this future research might be the construction of a clear, bounded, and universally accepted definition of the radical political right.