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The Normalization of the Radical Right: A Norms Theory of Political Supply and Demand. Vicente Valentim. (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The rise of radical-right parties in contemporary European polities has been the focus of extensive political analysis in the last two decades.Vicente Valentim's book offers an unflinching contribution to the burgeoning literature.The Normalization of the Radical Right seeks to explain why radical-right parties gain legitimacy and electoral support, emphasizing the influence of social norms and political costs.Shifts in social norms, rather than in political preferences, can alter political behavior, influence politicians' perceptions, and facilitate the normalization of radicalright support.The book provides a typology of preferences that highlights the mediating role of norms in translating private preferences into public behavior.In doing so, the book moves beyond the usual drivers covered by previous works, such as economic factors, cultural forces, emotions, or identity concerns.The author develops his theory primarily within a comparative framework across Western European democracies because the radical right's revival has been most visible in the region in the last twenty years.To establish a time frame for the analysis, the book positions itself in contemporaneity by drawing on references to the 2007 Portuguese election and the example of the radical right movement in Germany.In line with this, the book uses a mixed-methods approach, combining large-N quantitative analyses covering 1325 parties in 51 countries from over two and a half decades (1996-2020) with qualitative case studies of Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.These countries were chosen because they did not experience strong radical-right parties in the past, and to increase variation in the drivers for electoral support.It is divided into nine chapters that build a comprehensive account of the impact of social norms on political behavior, more narrowly radical right support.Chapter 1 offers a general introduction, positioning the study within the literature, complemented by methodological observations, as well as a synopsis of the chapters, both to orient the reader and to ensure the book's coherence.The theoretical framework is presented in Chapter 2 through the development of a norms-based supply-demand model of politics to show how politicians and voters traverse social costs and expressive benefits.Building on this, Valentim frames political costs as the anticipated social and reputational sanctions for expressing contranormative preferences, which explain why latent preferences remain hidden and how shifts in social acceptance can drive rapid political change.The next two chapters introduce the concept of political stigma and outline three normalization steps (latency, activation, and surfacing) and also explain how political stigma is measured.Chapters 5-7 examine each phase of normalization, integrating demand-and supply-side factors into a single explanatory framework.In these chapters, examples from Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom are analyzed to illustrate how latent preferences are activated and expressed, thereby complementing the in-depth case study of
DOI: 10.1017/s1682098326100216
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7128951620
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