Organized for Parliament? Explaining the Electoral Success of Radical Right Parties in Post-Communist Europe

Over the last three decades a great deal of research has been carried out in an attempt to explain the electoral performance of radical right parties in Europe. Most approaches concentrate on demand side determinants and have some limitations. We compensated for these shortcomings and focus on the context of party competition and supply-side determinants (consistency of ideological discourse, functioning party propaganda, the continuity of leader in office, and strong party organization) to explain the electoral success of radical right parties in post-communist Europe. We conducted our analysis at party level on nine radical right parties in four countries from Central and Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Romania) between 1990 and 2014. The bi-variate and multivariate (ordinal logistic regression) analyses draw on unique data collected from primary and secondary sources