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Introduction
The cartel party hypothesis states that cartel parties create under-representative party systems in which citizens' political demands are not adequately addressed nor satisfied by parties' political offers. The cartel party hypothesis further argues that the emergence of the new extreme right parties represents a reaction against the under-representativeness of the cartel of parties. The purpose of this paper is to refine this causal argument in the light of the three versions of the cartel party hypothesis identified in the literature. Specifically, it will be suggested that the systemic version of the cartel party hypothesis argues that the rise of the extreme right is a reaction against the increasing similarity in parties' electoral programs, which for the systemic-subjective version of the cartel party hypothesis the emergence of the extreme right represents a reaction against the centripetal convergence of the Social-Democratic (SD) and Moderately-Conservative Parties (MC), while for the subjective version of the cartel party hypothesis the electoral fortunes of the new extreme right reflect the perception of a growing distance between the position of the voters and that of the party system.
The paper is divided into four parts. The first part reviews the literature on the new extreme right. In doing so three main approaches are identified: the single issue, the socio-psychological and the cultural. Beside exploring the peculiarities of each of these approaches, it is argued that all such approaches are based on an implicit assumption: that the system parties' political offer is unable to satisfy voters' demands, which is exactly what is suggested by the cartel party hypothesis. Building on this discussion, the second part of the paper investigates how the systemic, the systemic-subjective and the subjective versions of the cartel party hypothesis explain the rise of the new extreme right. In the third part of the paper, I perform some statistical analyses to compare and contrast the explanatory power of the three versions of the cartel party hypothesis. The three variants of the cartel party hypothesis will be tested by using the German and the Dutch case.2 The analysis of the German and the Dutch survey data shows that the subjective version of the cartel party hypothesis has a greater explanatory power than the systemic and the systemic-subjective. The...