Populism, Radicalism, and Extremism: Disentangling the War of Words in Western Europe

The work aims to analyse the characteristics of the ideologies of extremist, radical and populist parties in Western Europe. In this regard, after outlining the ideal types of these parties, a series of hypotheses will be tested to see if these parties can be assimilated in the same ideological family or in distinct categories. More specifically, with original codebook and dataset, the attitudes of these parties towards democracy and their positioning on the economic and cultural axes will be tested, for the first time both on the Left and on the Right. The analysis will take into account five countries - France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom - with a time span of the last three national elections. Then it will be outlined a research agenda for the study of extremist and radical voters.