This article investigates three explanations for electoral support for the far right – ‘cultural backlash’, ‘economic grievances’ and ‘protest voting’ – in a novel way. Our main contribution is that we contrast far-right voters with voters of centre-right parties, traditional left-wing parties and abstainers. Equally innovative is the comparison between mature and post-communist democracies. Using European Social Survey data (2014–16), we conclude that anti-immigration attitudes are most important in distinguishing far-right voters from all other groups. Yet, these differences are significantly smaller in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, far-right voters are not the so-called socioeconomic ‘losers of globalization’: this is only true when compared with centre-right voters. Concerning protest voting, distrust of supranational governance particularly enhances far-right voting. Overall, our study concludes that more fine-grained distinctions pay off and avoid misleading generalizations about ‘European far-right voters’ often presented in public debates.

While debates about far-right populism often concentrate on Central and Eastern Europe, research on these parties predominantly focuses on Western countries. Addressing this remarkable gap, this article revisits the ‘protest voting’ explanation for electoral support for the far right. Using European Social Survey data (2002–16) from 22 countries, we show that political dissatisfaction is a stronger explanatory factor when far-right parties are in opposition, but is a less important determinant of electoral support when they are in government. Previous findings based on Western Europe – which similarly showed that the anti-elite hypothesis is less relevant when far-right parties join government coalitions – travel well to post-communist European countries. In Hungary and Poland, we even find that far-right voters have become less distrustful of national political institutions than the rest of the electorate. Our conclusion implies that anti-elite populism is context-dependent and has limited use for understanding successes of leaders such as Wilders, Salvini and Orbán.

We investigated whether income gaps in voting turnout vary with country-level economic inequality, and whether this pattern differs between wealthier and less-wealthy countries. Moreover, we investigated whether the prevalence of clientelism was the underlying mechanism that accounts for the presumed negative interaction between relative income and economic inequality at lower levels of national wealth per capita. The harmonised PolPart dataset, combining cross-national surveys from 66 countries and 292 country-years, including 510,184 individuals, was analysed using multilevel logistic regression models. We found that the positive effect of relative income on voting was weaker at higher levels of economic inequality, independent of the level of national wealth. Although clientelism partially explains why economic inequality reduces the income gap in voter turnout, it does not do so in the way we expected. It seems to decrease turnout of higher income groups, rather than increase turnout of lower income groups. Importantly, that economic inequality reduces the income gap in voter turnout does not imply that economic inequality is positive for democratic representation, since economic inequality was found to depress the likelihood of voting for all income groups.

This article aims to analyse and theorize the peculiarities of trust in mature and postcommunist democracies. First, the article conceptualizes the notion of trust as interpreted by the culturalist and rationalist approaches, and systemizes it into a more coherent theoretical framework. Second, social and political trust are discussed and the relationship between these is analysed. Third, the dialectics of political trust and liberalism is tackled. Finally, trust in the communist regime and aftermath is examined. The main argument is that, at the societal level, social trust in post-communist societies is limited to particularized trust; it is more family-centred as compared to the wider radius of generalized trust in mature democracies. Meanwhile political trust in post-communist societies is less self-reflexive, since, unlike in the older democratic societies, it has evolved in counterpose to fear, rather than to risk.keywords fear u generalized trust u institutionalized distrust u institutionalized trust u particularized trust u political trust u post-communism u risk

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