infonet-economy

This very exploratory paper looks at the impact of dominant conceptions of citizenship on the mobilization by the extreme right. Previous work has focused on the role of structural cleavages and institutional opportunities such as party alignments and competition. While we acknowledge the importance of such factors, here we focus on citizenship rights as the relevant political opportunity structure for the mobilization of the contemporary the extreme right in Western Europe. We start from the idea that one of the main characteristics of the contemporary extreme right is its framing of the notion of national identity in ethnocultural terms (as opposed to a framing in civic-territorial terms) and examine a number of hypotheses regarding four aspects of the mobilization by the extreme right: (1) its presence in the public space, (2) its organizational forms, (3) its forms of actions, and (4) the content of its claims. We illustrate our hypotheses through a comparison of public claim-making by extreme right actors in France and Switzerland, two countries that differ substantially in the models of citizenship.