PRELUDE

There are at least two possible approaches to the issue of political extremism. One is to study the operation of groups that are considered on some independent grounds to be extremist – perhaps in terms of the methods they use – and that see themselves and/or are seen by others to be broadly political in some meaningful sense. Thus, we might study the behaviour of the Red Guards or various of the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist groups for whom violence was an explicit tool in the pursuit of their political agenda. And we would distinguish such political terrorism from violence used by organized groups for merely criminal purposes. All such groups are extremist in method. Only those who have an explicit political agenda would be classified as relevant to political extremism. The reference in such a classification would be to the methods such groups use. Whether their political ends are extreme, and how indeed we would identify extremism of political ends, are separable questions. It is these latter questions with which I shall be concerned here. And I shall be concerned about them in a narrow, though not unfamiliar, context – the context of equilibrium outcomes in standard rational actor models of democratic political determination. Part of my reason for taking this approach is that this is where my expertise, such as it is, lies. But there is another reason, one perhaps more defensible.