Abstract: How does the radical right build legitimacy at the grassroots level? This article synthesizes recent scholarship on the local strategies through which radical right parties, movements, and civil society organizations construct territorial legitimacy. The review identifies three mechanisms. Transactional service delivery generates pragmatic legitimacy by positioning radical right actors as embedded community providers. Organizational territorial penetration produces credibility through the sustained presence of local branches, recognizable candidates, and professionalized activist networks. Metapolitical cultural embedding builds moral and cognitive legitimacy by reframing ethnonationalist ideas as common sense within local publics. These mechanisms operate at different scales and speeds, and their cumulative convergence transforms diffuse resentment into durable local credibility. A comparative thread distinguishes the radical right’s legitimacy strategies from those of the extreme right, whose overtly exclusionary framing and subcultural closure limit community-wide credibility gains. The review identifies two gaps in the literature. Research remains concentrated in Western Europe, leaving structurally distinct conditions in the global South largely unexamined. Studies also privilege party-electoral perspectives over the analysis of radical right civil society organizations as autonomous legitimacy builders.
