Interrupted Continuities: Local History and Support for the Radical Right

Elias Dinas and Elli Palaiologou

Journal of Historical Political Economy, 2024, vol. 4, issue 3, 391-428

Abstract: The rise of Golden Dawn (GD), Europe's most radical parliamentary party, sparked considerable media and scholarly attention. Conventional wisdom attributed this phenomenon to the anti-systemic appetite generated by the Greek debt crisis. Building on GD's fierce anti-communism, we propose a different explanation, one that highlights the revival of historical legacies during periods of abrupt political dealignment. Exposure to (communist-led) insurgent violence during the civil-war generated strongholds of anti-communist sentiment. The anti-right consensus that prevailed in the years following the democratic transition eroded its electoral salience. Anti-communism re-surged in response to the abrupt dealignment caused by the debt crisis, which enabled past trauma to regain political salience. A within-province, cross-village analysis shows that civil-war anti-communism predicts GD support, but only after the crisis. Apart from enhancing our understanding about the historical roots of the radical right, the findings of the study provide new insights into the mechanics of time-varying persistence.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/115.00000079 (application/xml)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlhpe:115.00000079

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Historical Political Economy from now publishers
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lucy Wiseman ().