ABSTRACT
When there is an apparent simultaneous emergence of increased extreme-right voting in different contiguous or near-contiguous countries, the idea of a ‘wave’, operating across these several different countries, is an attractive, if hyperbolic, metaphor to describe such a phenomenon – albeit that this usage is more associated with popular commentators than with academic researchers. How appropriate in this perspective? Its presumption is that the increases (and decreases) in support for these parties occur simultaneously in the different countries. The ebbs and flows between 1982 and 1995 of support for extreme-right political parties in five west European countries show that this metaphor has only limited and specific plausibility as a description of what happened. Polling data of support are compared with simultaneous electoral performances and any differences are noted. Then, correlations and principal-components analyses of these polling data, measured both monthly and quarterly as unweighted means, suggest similar over-time trajectories of such support in Belgium and the Netherlands and separately in Austria and France; the first may be attributable to cultural and linguistic consociation, though the second may simply be incidental. West and East Germany, each with its own time-series, have similar over-time trajectories and, using the quarterly data, are in turn close to the Belgium and Dutch pattern, although that is less obvious with their monthly time series.
