Use of the term "Right" became more prominent after the second restoration of the French monarchy in 1815 with the Ultra-royalists. Today it is primarily used to refer to political groups that have a historical connection with the traditional Right, including conservatives, reactionaries, monarchists, aristocrats and theocrats. The term is also used to describe those who support free market capitalism, and those who support some forms of nationalism.

The political term right-wing originates from the French Revolution when liberal deputies from the Third Estate generally sat to the left of the president's chair, a habit which began in the Estates General of 1789. The nobility, members of the Second Estate, generally sat to the right. In the successive legislative assemblies, monarchists who supported the Ancien Régime were commonly referred to as rightists because they sat on the right side. One major figure on the right was Joseph de Maistre who argued for an authoritarian and less liberal form of conservatism. Throughout the 19th century, the main line dividing Left and Right in France was between supporters of the Republic and those of the Monarchy.

On the right, the Legitimists and Ultra-royalists held counter-revolutionary views and rejected any compromise with modern ideologies while the Orleanists hoped to create a constitutional monarchy, under their preferred branch of the royal family, a brief reality after the 1830 July Revolution. The Bonapartists advocated the idea of a strong and centralized state, based on popular support. Since then the term right-wing has come to be associated with preserving the status quo in the form of institutions and traditions.

In Europe, with a strong traditional class-structure, historians and social scientists identified the political spectrum on the basis of class, with left, right, and center representing the working, upper, and middle classes. While these cleavages developed at the time of the French revolution, they deepened in the 19th century and both right and left accepted the class nature of their positions. While universal suffrage, the acceptance of democracy, and regional and religious division blurred the distinction between the groups, the analysis continued to be applied. The most usual ideologies of left, right, and center were socialism, conservatism, and liberalism. Seymour Martin Lipset saw modern political parties as continuing the "Democratic Class Struggle" that led to their creation.

In the US, with its economic system less codified as a rigid structure of hereditary social classes, the political spectrum has been analyzed with a more ideological emphasis. For example, Louis Hartz identified the mainstream political ideology of America as Lockean liberalism, not lying in a feudal past, and saw the two main opposing forces in American history as Whig and Democrat, representing the industrialists and the agriculturalists, but both accepting liberal principles and therefore essentially centrist. Russell Kirk however argued that the American Revolution had been a conservative reaction and therefore the term conservative could apply to American politics.

Although Kirk's theory gained very little academic acceptance, it popularized the term conservative in the United States and it was adopted by the New Right and later by the majority of the Republican Party and blue dog Democrats. Lipset coined the term radical right in 1955 to describe radical groups opposed to social reforms and foreign interventionism and the term right later came to be applied to American conservatism.

Friedrich Hayek wrote that it was incorrect to represent the political spectrum as a line with socialists on the left, conservatives on the right and liberals in the middle. Instead he suggested seeing each group as pulling at the corner of a triangle. The socialists had by mid-twentieth century pulled harder, so that the entire political spectrum had shifted to the left and socialist ideas had become respectable. In the United States however the difference between conservatives and liberals was obscured by the fact that it was possible to defend individual liberty by defending established institutions, as the American tradition was liberal. He thought that the attempt to transplant the European type of conservatism to America had created confusion in viewing the political spectrum as had the tendency of American radicals and socialists to call themselves liberals.

Other libertarians reject being described as "left" or "right." Leonard Read rejected these terms as "authoritarian." Harry Browne wrote: "We should never define Libertarian positions in terms coined by liberals or conservatives – nor as some variant of their positions." Walter Block also has rejected the labels.

In the West, after World War II, traditional rightist parties and movements such as monarchists, aristocrats and authoritarian conservatives have diminshed in power on the mainstream right and were replaced with liberal conservatives, libertarians and laissez faire capitalists.[citation needed]

The spectrum of right-wing politics ranges from centre-right to far right. By the late 19th century, the French political spectrum classified the center-right as Constitutional Monarchists, Orleanists, and Bonapartists, and the far right as Ultra-Royalists and Legitimists. The centre-right Gaullists in post-World War II France advocated considerable social spending on education and infrastructure development, as well as extensive economic regulation but a limited amount of the wealth redistribution measures more characteristic of social democracy.