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Extreme right parties must make a series of strategicdiscursive choices when deciding where to locate within the extreme right ideological universe and which unique aspects of their discourse to showcase in order to provide simple and clear-cut ideological cues to voters and potential voters. Extreme right parties have to make a series of ideological choices within this defined and bounded ideological space, strategic-discursive choices that define their ideological identity. 1) enables us to locate the parties in our analysis relative to each other within their domestic party systems and across external party systems.

2005). Norris (2005) finds, however that the correlation between the left/right position of the main competitor and the vote shares of 16 extreme right parties is not significant. In contrast to this finding, van der Brug et al. (2005) find that two supply-side factors and one demand-side variable explain 83 per cent of the variation in the electoral fortunes of the 25 parties included in their study. The supply-side variables include: 1. The degree to which the party is seen to be a normal democratic party; and 2.

Finally, as we have seen in the review of the literature, although many new labels and terms have been proposed, scholars in the field have not agreed unanimously that any of these should replace the existing term extreme right; most such terms and labels fail to stand the empirical test in a way that would validate their conceptual and analytical framework. As mentioned earlier, there has been controversy in the literature regarding which parties belong to the extreme right family. In order to test our model, we include in the empirical analysis parties deemed in some of the existing literature to belong to the extreme right which have scored at least 1 per cent of the vote or equivalent in a recent national election in the political systems included in our analysis (see Chapter 3).