Downplaying Extremism? How the State Approaches Right-wing and Left-wing Extremist Threats

The rise of right-wing extremism (RWE) is often attributed to citizens’ economic and cultural grievances. We know less about how the state facilitates RWE in contemporary democracies, despite commonly voiced claims that state actors help RWE flourish due to their biased treatment of political extremism. How valid is this critique? Analyzing thousands of documents covering the behavior of political parties, intelligence agencies, and the police in Germany over many decades and across states, we demonstrate that state actors have systematically downplayed RWE. This bias is not a feature of the state per se; it only emerges consistently among center-right actors. Partisanship thus biases how even presumptively neutral state actors address the far-right extremist threat, a bias that we find exists even in the absence of strategic electoral considerations. Taken together, our research demonstrates that the very state actors charged with fighting extremism are highly influenced by partisanship and ideology.