The Many Contexts of Radicalism, Populism, and Extremism: From the Local to the Transnational

This section offers a forum for scholars working on radical, populist, and extremist challengers of democracy. Embracing theoretical and methodological pluralism, it will gather panels and papers focusing on diverse issues, including antidemocratic and antipluralist discourses and ideologies, individual-level attitudes, party and movement action forms, organization, and strategies, as well as the impact of political mobilizations on and beyond the ‘mainstream’. Recent decades have seen the ‘mainstreaming’ and normalization of various forms of political radicalism and extremism across the globe. In the process, notions of place have become increasingly salient in the scholarly debate on the antidemocratic and antipluralist challenges to democracy. Today, populist actors exercise pressure not only on national parliaments, but on all levels of political decision-making: from local to regional and from national to supranational contexts. Radical actors have diversified, and now involve a broad array of organizational forms that campaign at different levels of democratic polities. At the same time, scholars have noted the spread of extremist attitudes within and across populations, marked by important regional and national variations. Crucially, the different levels of radical, populist, and extremist mobilizations interact in manifold ways, raising new research questions of whether and how local, national, and global issues, forms of action, and strategies impact each other through ‘upscaling’ and ‘downscaling’. Clearly, processes of globalization have strongly impacted such actors, for instance visible in the adoption of new issues and strategies around the climate crisis, COVID-19, gender politics, and new and old geopolitical conflicts. Concurrently, local disputes around issues, such as infrastructure, migrant housing, or energy policies, are often embedded in modes of the ‘glocal’ political economy and uneven development, and together with other local(ised) grievances, they have given rise to a highly polarized rural-urban divide, around which antidemocratic and antipluralist actors construct emotional appeals. Moreover, the challengers to democracy gain increasing traction around antiglobalist discourses and the continued questioning of international organizations, such as the European Union and the United Nations, posing challenges to international collaboration and alliance-building. Considering these developments, scholars call for studies of how radicalism, populism and extremism affect the policy cycle at the sub-national, national, and supranational levels. To further understand these processes, this section invites contributions that explore whether and how antidemocratic and antipluralist actors shape politics at different levels and scales, both in terms of policy-making, political deliberation, and attitudes. Scholars are invited to propose papers and panels that offer new theoretical and methodological perspectives and broadly cover the aspects listed below. Preference will be given to innovative panels that mirror the diversity of the ECPR research community in terms of career stage, gender, ethnicity, and regional expertise, and we strive to ensure the participation of early career scholars. ▪️ Issues, Ideology and Frames: Which old and new issues are salient in radical, populist, and extremist mobilizations in local, national, and transnational contexts? How do actors frame old and new geopolitical conflicts and global crises? What are the legacies of the spread of conspiracy narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic? To what extent do antidemocratic and antipluralist actors draw on transnational discourses at the domestic level? What is the relationship between local, national, and transnational issues and frames? ▪️ Forms of Action: How do radical, populist, and extremist actors mobilize around old and new issues at different scales? How do local, national, and transnational electoral and protest campaigns differ? What is the role of online mobilization in relation to offline forms of action? ▪️ Attitudes and Expectations: What is the role of individual-level attitudes in the rise of radical, populist, and extremist mobilizations in local, national, and transnational contexts? How do attitudes shape varying support for such movements and parties in different locations? What are the current drivers of opposition towards international organizations and globalization? What explains current levels of trust in political institutions at all policy-levels? What is the role of place-based attachments for explaining political attitudes? ▪️ Political Communication and Media: How do radical, populist, and extremist actors communicate their issues within and across electoral and protest arenas in local, national, and transnational settings? How do their discourses affect local, national, European, and international debates? What is the role of both established and novel types of (social) media in communicating in different contexts? ▪️ Party and Movement Organization: What are the particularities of radical, populist, and extremist party organization at the local, national, and transnational level? How are parties and movements structured in terms of leadership? What is the role of local and regional strongholds for party organization and street mobilization? What is the role of parties’ youth organizations at different levels of polities? ▪️ Party Competition and Strategies: How do radical, populist, and extremist parties compete across all levels of decision-making? What are the differences between their local, national, and transnational campaigns? How do these parties shape coalition-building and policy-making? What are the strategies by ‘mainstream’ parties in response to their radical, populist, and extremist competitors? ▪️ Impact and Consequences: How do radical, populist and extremist party and movement actors influence political discourse and policy-making at different levels of polity? To what extent do they drive the mainstreaming and normalization of extreme ideas and ideologies across societies? ▪️ Responses and Counterstrategies: How are radical, populist, and extremist actors threatening (liberal) democracy at the local, regional, national and supranational level? What is the impact of such parties in (sub-)national governments? How have EU institutions responded to the rise of populist national leaders? How do civil society, media, and other political parties respond to radical and illiberal actors at the local level? ▪️ Methodological Approaches: How can new qualitative and quantitative methods and techniques advance our understanding of the role of radical, populist, and extreme actors and attitudes at all levels of polity? How can we operationalize and measure individuals’ attitudes towards and expectations of different levels of polity? How do individuals conceive of democracy at the local, regional, national, and supranational levels?