Far-right movement parties in Europe: Two perspectives

Taking as a starting point the growing body of scholarship on movement parties of the far right, this research note undertakes a reflection on the boundaries of the movement party concept from two distinct angles - the established interactive-mobilisational approach and the more recent discursive-organisational one - and their empirical implications for the study of far-right movement parties in Europe today. While the former approach's emphasis on the hybridity of electoral and protest-based collective action repertoires as the primary defining feature of movement parties suggests a wide-ranging applicability of the concept to the far right, the latter approach's understanding of the movement party as a specific organisational type based on horizontal coordinative links between constituent movements via collective leadership structures appears to pull in the opposite direction. These differences are explored in an overview of three far-right parties that fit both movement party definitions to varying degrees - CasaPound in Italy, Right Sector in Ukraine, and Konfederacja in Poland - followed by a discussion of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as an ambivalent case that prototypically fits the interactive-mobilisational understanding but falls short of the discursive-organisational one, thus magnifying the conceptual differences between the two approaches.