Abstract
<p>Why do some local communities become more susceptible to far-right mobilization than others? Existing research has emphasized elite rhetoric, mainstream party strategies, demographic change, and economic shocks, but has paid comparatively little attention to the organizational foundations of democratic competition. I argue that the electoral success of far-right parties depends not only on their own mobilization efforts but also on the organizational embeddedness of mainstream parties in local civil society. As mainstream parties become increasingly detached from civic associations through processes of partisan dealignment, cartelization, and the professionalization of politics, they leave behind organizational vacuums that anti-democratic challengers can exploit. I test this argument using novel longitudinal data on local party candidates in Germany, which I link to their involvement in civic associations and combine with municipality-level electoral returns. Exploiting within-municipality variation over time, I show that declining civic embeddedness of mainstream party elites is associated with higher electoral support for the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The findings are robust across multiple measures of organizational embeddedness and are particularly pronounced in West Germany. More broadly, the paper qualifies existing work on social capital by showing that the political consequences of civic associations depend on the organizational presence of mainstream democratic parties. Far-right mobilization, I argue, is best understood as the culmination of a long-term process of organizational withdrawal by mainstream parties from local civil society.</p>