L to R: Geert Wilders of The Netherlands, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, Germany’s Jörg Meuthen, and France’s Marine Le Pen, May 2019 (Luca Bruno/AP)


The Populism in Action Project’s Daniele Albertazzi and Stijn van Kessel are editing a special issue of the open-access journal Politics and Governance for publication in 2021.

The issue will be the first substantial presentation of PiAP’s research findings, exploring the organization and form that mass membership, right-wing populist parties adopt in western Europe.

In addition to focusing on the Project’s cases of Belgium, Finland, Italy, and Switzerland, the articles will make a major contribution to comparative understanding of right-wing populist parties more broadly. Thanks to a number of articles written by scholars from outside the research team, the special issue will also examine cases in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, and Slovakia. This will be one of the most extensive studies of how right wing populist parties organize, motivate and relate to their members and most committed supporters.

Contributions will examine:

1) To what extent and how the parties seek to develop a mass party-type organisation.

2) To what extent do the parties remain centralized in decision-making, including ideological direction, campaigning, and internal procedures.

3) Whether we can observe meaningful variation between older and newer RWPPs, and between RWPPs in long-established West European democracies and those in post-communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

Between now and the publication of the special issue, we will continue to explore these questions through PiAP on EA WorldView, on Twitter, and on Facebook.