Mudde, Cas. "Fighting the system? Populist radical right parties and party system change". Party Politics, Vol.20, No.2 (2014): 217-226.

Mudde, Cas. "Fighting the system? Populist radical right parties and party system change". Party Politics, Vol.20, No.2 (2014): 217-226.

• The author defines the 'populist radical right' as that group of party borne during the 1980s or afterwards which share an ideology of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism. A populist radical right party should have all of these traits (218).
• Nativism is here defined as a preference for native inhabitants of a country and against both immigrants and perceived 'outsiders', such as the Roma or ethnic minorities (218).
• Authoritarianism is here defined as a 'law and order' mentality, especially concerning crime. It is does not necessarily imply a belief in natural or biological hierarchy (218).
• Populism is defined as a worldview which divides the population between a 'pure' and 'moral' public and the 'corrupt' elites who are working against the general interest (218).
• The success of the populist radical right has been divergent across Europe, achieving great success in European nations like Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria, but facing exclusion from government in most other European countries. The trend, however, is on the rise (218).
• The author assesses whether the rise of populist right-wing parties has fundamentally changed the party systems within European countries. These parties have not change the multiparty or bi-partisan nature of European political systems, which have remained relatively unchanged since the late 1940s (218).
• The full analysis apparently shows that populist radical right parties did not have a major effect on party systems in Western Europe. They have affected small change in some countries, but not a large amount and not across the board (223).
• Despite years of research which assumed that the nature of populist radical right parties made them unsuitable for coalition government, supported through their simple non-inclusion in coalitions throughout the 1980s, modern trends indicate that the logic underpinning inclusion of the radical right in government is just the same as any other party (223).