interpret anti-immigrant voting as the spilling over of cultural and materialistic resentment toward immigrants,
particularly among those in the more marginal economic sectors. Such interpretations offer a ‘bottom-up’
perspective on how anti-immigrant party support is generated. By contrast, political opportunity explanations adopt
a ‘top-down’ approach to anti-immigrant voting, arguing that it is a particular constellation of forces within the
political environment, specifically the ideological climate, that creates the incentive for people to vote for anti-
immigrant parties. While these arguments are clearly relevant to understanding extreme right-wing party success,
systematic comparative empirical analysis of their claims has been limited. Grievance-based explanations have
been tested primarily with aggregate data and thus their conclusions about individual motivation are based on
ecological inference. Political opportunity explanations have been supported largely by impressionistic accounts or
single-case evidence.
More recently, there has been a move toward a more ‘integrated’ understanding of these parties’ success
whereby these different levels of explanation are seen to work in tandem and also interactively to create the
conditions producing their success (Norris, 2005; Arzheimer and Carter, 2005; Lubbers et al. 2002). Thus, while
the growing appeal of the basic message of the radical right is no doubt responsible for their increasing success,
these accounts also argue that analysts must be aware of how the parties may be responding to the constraints and
opportunities presented by the wider political and institutional environment to pitch their appeal and maximize
their support. The challenge for the current crop of political scientists investigating this phenomenon, therefore,
lies in attempting to capture this more multi-faceted and ‘in-flux’ state of affairs.
In a bid to advance the understanding of these new radical or extreme right parties along these more
integrated lines we present a new more comprehensive model of their success that examines the impact of these
two levels of explanation (individual and systemic). In doing so we offer new and more direct measures of anti-
immigrant grievances at the individual level alongside the conventional more macro-level changes in the
socioeconomic environment, and also new comparative indicators of the political opportunity structure. A final
innovation of our approach is to introduce and test a third pathway to mobilization, the relevance of which has
been discussed in passing by many of these studies but surprisingly not operationalised so far – the echo chamber
of prejudice. All three types of explanations are tested with a cross-national multilevel analysis at three time-
points, 1988, 1994 and 2000. Overall, therefore, the paper aims to provide a more comprehensive picture and
accurate empirical specification of the factors fuelling the recent growth in support for certain parties of the
extreme right.
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Convention