Chapter 9 - Societal Responses and Local Organizational Development

Summary

Attempts by extremist right-wing parties to grow organizational roots in local societies mobilize a diverse array of societal groups against them. The organizational effect of this mobilization has received some scholarly attention but, for the most part, it has defied systematic empirical investigation. This chapter brings together an array of evidence to systematically trace societal mobilization against extremist right-wing parties and to assess the effects of these societal responses on their local organizational development. The first part of the chapter examines how the literature treats societal reactions to extremism to generate various hypotheses about how such reactions shape organizational outcomes. The second section provides an overview of societal responses to the Golden Dawn (GD) in the past decade. It focuses on the diverse array of antifascist actors, their varied organizational resources and their wide range of tactics. The third section seeks to provide a systematic examination of the effects of societal reactions on the organizational evolution of various local branches of the GD.