ABSTRACT
Theoretical reasoning in political science and sociology during the 1990s about the determinants of support for extreme-right movements and activism in western Europe, especially in the Federal Republic of Germany, relied heavily on a concept of Modernisierungsverlierer (‘losers from modernization’), or variants of it; at the time this concept was especially associated with the German sociologist, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, and those who were supposed victims according to this perspective were seen as the most likely to support extreme-right movements and ideologies. However, one may see in this perspective an unacknowledged heritage, if not the exact vocabulary, of earlier theories, especially those about the dynamics of support for such movements as 1950s McCarthyism in the United States. Concepts seen in American political sociology from Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset about status anxiety and concerns or Talcott Parsons’s argument about social strains are uncited precursors of the Modernisierungsverlierer perspective. Also invoked to account for extreme-right, especially racist, support in cities are various theories of urban process that reflect very similar earlier arguments in the United States about intra-city racial residential segregation and its effect in producing racist voting behaviour.
