How the Radical Right Has Changed Capitalism and Welfare in Europe and the USA

Radical right parties are no longer political challengers on the fringes of party systems; they have become part of the political mainstream across the Western world. This book shows how they have used their political power to reform economic and social policies in Continental Europe, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and the USA. In doing so, it argues that the radical right's core ideology of nativism and authoritarianism informs their socio-economic policy preferences. However, diverse welfare state contexts mediate their socio-economic policy impacts along regime-specific lines, leading to variations of trade protectionism, economic nationalism, traditional familialism, labour market dualism, and welfare chauvinism. The radical right has used the diverse policy instruments available within their political-economic arrangements to protect threatened labour market insiders and male breadwinners from decline, while creating a racialized and gendered precariat at the same time. This socio-economic agenda of selective status protection restores horizontal inequalities in terms of gender and ethnicity, without addressing vertical inequalities between the rich and the poor. Combining insights from comparative politics, party politics, comparative political economy, and welfare state research, the book provides novel insights into how the radical right manufactures consent for authoritarian rule by taming the socially corrosive effects of globalised capitalism for key electoral groups, while aiming to exclude the rest from democratic participation.

Table of Contents:
1: Introduction 2: The socio-economic transformation of the radical right 3: Policy preferences and impacts of radical right parties 4: Chauvinist and familialist insider protection in Continental Europe 5: Chauvinist insider in Northern Europe 6: Familialist protection and economic nationalism in the Visegrád region 7: The Trumpian exception of trade protection in the USA 8: Conclusions

About the Author :
Philip Rathgeb is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Policy in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. Philip holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute (EUI) and held visiting positions at Harvard University, Lund University, University of Southern Denmark, and the EUI. His research interests are in comparative political economy and comparative politics, with a particular focus on welfare states, industrial relations, and party politics. His first book Strong Governments, Precarious Workers was published with Cornell University Press in 2018.

Review :
In this important book, Philip Rathgeb demonstrates the massive impact radical right parties have on welfare states and capitalist economies when in power. Making sense of the unity and diversity of their policies, he shows that these parties are united in their nativist and authoritarian values and use socio economic policies as tools to achieve them. At the same time, existing institutions shape their diverse policy impact, from welfare chauvinism in continental Europe and the Nordic countries to trade protectionism in the US and economic nationalism in the Visegrád countries. This thought-provoking analysis is a huge step forward in understanding the radical right in power. This is an important and much-needed study. There has been much speculation whether the Radical Right could be a new advocate for the working class and redistribution, or even a pro-welfare ally of the Left. However, in his thorough, original and important book, Philip Rathgeb demonstrates that the Radical Right consistently uses social policy to serve its nativist and authoritarian ideological goals. The specific policies supported vary across institutional contexts, but the ideological core remains the same. This book is a masterful achievement in both theoretical and empirical regards. Most studies of the rise of the radical right focus on the cultural dimension of its nativist challenge and pay scant attention to its implications for the political economy. Philip Rathgeb's brilliant book fills this gap with theoretical and empirical brio. Across a range of cases, it shows how radical right parties in government adapt their nativist and authoritarian platform to different institutional settings, favouring welfare chauvinism, economic nationalism or trade protectionism. How the Radical Right has Changed Capitalism and Welfare is a must-read for anyone interested in comparative political economy, and indeed the future of liberal democracy.