Rydgren, Jens. "Is Extreme Right-wing Populism Contagious? Explaining the Emergence of a New Party Family". European Journal of Political Research, Vol.44, No.3 (2005): 413-437.

Rydgren, Jens. "Is Extreme Right-wing Populism Contagious? Explaining the Emergence of a New Party Family". European Journal of Political Research, Vol.44, No.3 (2005): 413-437.

• Since the devestation of the Second World War, the main arguments of the far-right: biological racism, antisemitism, opposition to democracy; have been marginalized in European politics, a trend exacerbated by generally positive economic conditions from the 1950s onward (413).
• While the collapse of political trust in governmental institutions in the 1960s combined with an economic recession during the 1970s both increased support for the extreme right in Europe, it was unable to became a major political force due to continued dependence on biological racism and neo-fascist ideology (414).
• The extreme right only began to make a resurgence in the mid-1980s, as a new brand of right-wing populist parties appeared in Western Europe (414). This group of parties has shifted towards cultural, rather than biological, racism and fully supports democracy, dropping the anti-democratic authoritarian ideology of previous far-right parties (416).
• The new frame of political issues developed by the extreme right-wing populist parties is that different racial and ethnic groups have irreconcilable differences requiring that they be separated to preserve distinct cultures -- while not explicitly racist, it is often used to promote ethnic exclusivism -- and that the current political elite are ignoring these problems and others caused by globalization while the common man suffers (426-428).
• Most scholars have proposed deindustrialization and resulting economic depression as the primary reason why populist right-wing parties establish such a presence in Europe during the 1980s. This argument, although not incorrect, fails to fully examine the ideology underlying these parties and why they have only developed in some post-industrial societies (415-416).
• Different populist right-wing parties across Europe are learning from the experiences of others. The most prominent in this aspect has been the French Front National, which provided the ideological inspiration for similar political movements in Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands (416-417, 426, 428-429).
• This process is adaptive rather than pure mimicry, since parties change certain issues and rhetoric to fit the national context. For example, neither Danish nor Swedish parties have adopted the anti-abortion stance of Front National, simply because that issues does not have the salience or support in non-French national contexts (431, 433).
• Recent changes in European politics, specifically the profound economic and social changes caused by globalization, have made Europe more suseptible to new parties of all kinds by decreasing trust in the political establishment, changing the interests of voter groups, and making voters more fearful (419-420. 422).
• These changes have created several new 'niches' for political parties that were unanticipated by mainstream political parties. Most noticable among these niches have been xenophobia and ethnic nationalism (420).
• These changes have also tied sociocultural issues like immigration to conceptions of economic wellbeing, already damaged by competition from globalization. This was resulted in particularly large numbers of the working class moving towards right-wing populist parties, as they well it defends their economic and social interests (421).
• Politics in the West has been dominated by two primary cleavages since the beginning of the post-war era: an economic cleavage between capital and labour, and a sociocultural cleavage on ethics and social policy. For most of the post-war period, the economic cleavage was dominant. The switch to sociocultural issues in the 1980s expanded the ability of right-wing populist parties to weight-in on political issues (420-421). I'm 90% sure that none of that is true, especially since the sources being cited are political scientists from the 1980s.
• In addition to the structural factors discussed, the ability of extreme right-wing populist parties to enter electoral politics in Europe is also affected by the presence of allies in mainstream politics, the openness of the electoral system to small parties, access to the media, and national prohibitions of certain kinds of political organizations -- most parties of this type are banned in Germany, for instance (422-425).