During the past two decades, the radical right has reemerged as an electoral force in Western Europe, as well as in other stable democracies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Aside from discussing the ideology of this party family and how it relates to older forms of right-wing radicalism and extremism, such as fascism, this review deals with the question of how the emergence of radical right-wing parties can be explained and why such parties have been considerably more successful among voters in some countries than in others. Possible explanations are grouped into two parts: The first consists of so-called demand-centered explanations, that is, explanations that focus on changing preferences, beliefs, and attitudes among voters. The second consists of so-called supply-side explanations, that is, explanations that focus on political opportunity structures and party organizational factors.

Given how central the immigration issue has been for the new radical right‐wing parties in Western Europe, many have turned to immigration‐related factors in trying to explain their emergence and electoral mobilisation. This research has convincingly shown that immigration scepticism (i.e., wanting to reduce immigration) is among the principal factors for predicting who will vote for a radical right‐wing party. However, earlier studies have often uncritically equated immigration scepticism with xenophobia or even racism. By using data from the first round of the European Social Survey (2003) involving six West European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway), this article differentiates between immigration scepticism and xenophobic attitudes. The analyses strongly indicate that xenophobic attitudes are a far less significant factor than immigration scepticism for predicting who will vote for the new radical right. Moreover, this article analyses the extent to which anti‐immigration frames employed by radical right‐wing parties resonate with attitudes held by supporting voters, and to what extent they make a difference for people's decision to vote for the radical right. The analyses indicate that frames linking immigration to criminality and social unrest are particularly effective for mobilising voter support for the radical right. Finally, the article criticises earlier research that explained radical right‐wing voting with reference to ethnic competition theory. In contrast to much of the earlier research that used macro‐level measures and comparisons, this study uses (self‐reported) individual‐level data on the degree of ethnic heterogeneity of people's area of residence. Hypotheses derived from ethnic competition theory receive less support than expected, which indicates that earlier research may have overestimated the significance of these factors.

Abstract.  This article presents a new model for explaining the emergence of the party family of extreme right‐wing populist parties in Western Europe. As the old master frame of the extreme right was rendered impotent by the outcome of the Second World War, it took the innovation of a new, potent master frame before the extreme right was able to break electoral marginalization. Such a master frame – combining ethnonationalist xenophobia, based on the doctrine of ethnopluralism, with anti‐political‐establishment populism – evolved in the 1970s, and was made known as a successful frame in connection with the electoral breakthrough of the French Front National in 1984. This event started a process of cross‐national diffusion, where embryonic extreme right‐wing groups and networks elsewhere adopted the new frame. Hence, the emergence of similar parties, clustered in time (i.e., the birth of a new party family) had less to do with structural factors influencing different political systems in similar ways as with cross‐national diffusion of frames. The innovation and diffusion of the new master frame was a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the emergence of extreme right‐wing populist parties. In order to complete the model, a short list of different political opportunity structures is added.

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