Electoral Fortune by Bartek Pytlas. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. 260pp., £90.00 (h/b), ISBN. 9781138889668. Radical right parties have firmly established them-.
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impact on the phenomenon and thus leaving the door open for the presidentialisation of parliamentary systems in certain phases. This book is essential for those interested in party politics, as well as for those concerned with the phenomenon of presidentialisation and personalisation. It is accessible to scholars at all levels. Maximilien Cogels (Université Catholique de Louvain) © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1478929916672955 journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe: Mainstream Party Competition and Electoral Fortune by Bartek Pytlas. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. 260pp., £90.00 (h/b), ISBN 9781138889668
Radical right parties have firmly established themselves in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since 1989. However, their support has waxed and waned more than that of their counterparts in Western Europe. This paradox, Bartek Pytlas argues, in a comparative study of Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, can be explained by the fact that ideological boundaries between radical outsiders and mainstream parties are more blurred. Conservative nationalists (Hungary, Poland) and social populists (Slovakia) provide stiff competition for the CEE radical right but can also legitimise radical right themes and offer it a route into coalition government (Poland, Slovakia). Competition between radical right parties and the mainstream ‘near radical right’, Pytlas argues, should be studied not just in spatial or directional terms (as in conventional party competition theory) but also in discursive terms: how parties frame and interpret radical nationalist narratives that are widely resonant in CEE. Radical right success cannot simply be read as a backlash by ‘transition losers’ against post-communist socio-economic modernisation. Pytlas uses Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDA) of newspapers and party programmes supplemented by polling and expert survey data to pick out the key nationalist frames in the three states – for example, Poland as a ‘bulwark of Christianity’ or ‘Gypsy crime’ in Hungary – and to establish their
resonance and ‘ownership’. Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the author then identifies how these patterns combine into ‘synergy frameworks’ which can explain the undulating electoral fortunes of the radical right. Radical Right Parties in Central and Eastern Europe is a methodologically bold and sophisticated fusion of party competition theory, notions of political opportunity structures, and ideas about framing. Its thoroughly argued analysis generates conclusions that are both credible and original. The book’s key finding is that the radical right parties succeed where they have ownership of resonant frames on salient issues. Mainstream competitors can block off the rise of the radical right either by keeping the nationalist issues it owns off the political agenda or – if it cannot – by taking over these frames, albeit at the risk of mainstreaming them. The book’s main weaknesses are arguably an over-focus on the discursive, screening out a raft of organisational and social factors and the many unresolved questions about why the discursive agency of far-right parties varies. It is unclear, for example, why Hungary’s Jobbik party successfully created the ‘Gypsy crime’ frame while, with similar levels of public anti-Roma prejudice, the radical right in Slovakia did not. Seán Hanley (University College London) © The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1478929916672956 journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Comparative Welfare State Politics: Development, Opportunities, and Reform by Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 260pp., £19.99 (p/b), ISBN 9780521183710
This book was explicitly written as ‘a cross between a text- or reference book that informs the reader comprehensively about the state of the art in the field of welfare state studies and an academic research monograph that aims to contribute theoretically and empirically to the ongoing debate on the politics of welfare state reform’ (p. 4). It performs adequately on the second task – mainly through synthesis – and
