One of the central messages of this book is that there has been no common political response to the structural transformations – immigration, globalization, post-Fordism – that have characterized all Western European countries over the past several decades. These transformations created opportunities for radical right parties to succeed in the long term, but our cross-national historical analysis has demonstrated that they were able to do so only under certain circumstances. The political effects of sociostructural change and exogenous pressures were refracted through national-level variables. In the case of radical right parties, these were not the variables one might immediately suspect, such as the electoral system or other formal political institutions, and this book has focused on two in particular. First, while radical right parties, like fascist movements, are the product of a distinct historical epoch, their success and failure cannot be understood in isolation from the movements that preceded them. Second, the degree of legitimacy accorded to radical right parties – in part because of historical factors, in part because of tactical calculations by other political actors – created opportunities in some cases and major hurdles in other. Thus both historical legacies and political culture were the critical intervening variables between sociostructural transformation and political outcomes.

To support this broad point, this book focused on the microlevel processes of party building. It demonstrated how history and political culture affected both the number and type of activists that were willing to work on behalf of radical right parties.