Anti-immigrant, politically disaffected or still racist after all? Examining the attitudinal drivers of extreme right support in Britain in the 2009 European elections

Abstract

The elections to the European Parliament (EP) held in June 2009 marked a breakthrough for the extreme right British National Party (BNP), while in other European states extreme right parties (ERPs) similarly made gains. However, the attitudinal drivers of support for the BNP and ERPs more generally remain under‐researched. This article draws on unique data that allow unprecedented insight into the attitudinal profile of ERP voters in Britain – an often neglected case in the wider literature. A series of possible motivational drivers of extreme right support are separated out: racial prejudice, anti‐immigrant sentiment, protest against political elites, Euroscepticism, homophobia and Islamophobia. It is found that BNP support in the 2009 EP elections was motivationally diverse, with racist hostility, xenophobia and protest voting all contributing significantly to BNP voting. The analysis suggests that the BNP, which has long been a party stigmatised by associations with racism and violent extremism, made a key breakthrough in 2009. While racist motivations remain the strongest driver of support for the party, it has also begun to win over a broader coalition of anti‐immigrant and anti‐elite voters.

European Parliament elections and EU governance

“…Extremist parties on both the left and right often take a more anti-European stance than centrist parties (Cutts, Ford, and Goodwin 2010;de Vries and Edwards 2009;Ray 1999;Taggart 1998). Hix and Marsh (2007) find that, leaving aside the success of some parties that only contest EP elections, anti-EU parties on average do much better in European than in national elections.…”

Love Thy Neighbor? Relationships between Religion and Racial Intolerance in Europe

“…There are a few case studies looking at anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attitudes in selected countries (Billiet and De Witte 2008;Ford 2008;Cutts, Ford, and Goodwin 2011;Frølund Thomsen 2012;Hodson, Sekulic, and Massey 1994) and a few large-scale cross-national comparisons (Coenders and Scheepers 2003;Eisinga, Billiet, and Felling 1999;Doebler 2013;Scheepers, Gijsberts, and Hello 2002;Schneider 2007;Strabac and Listhaug 2008).…”

Is racism the new sectarianism? Negativity towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland from 2004 to 2015

“…In the wake of the Brexit vote in the UK and Donald Trump's presidential campaign in 2016, both of which were to a large extent driven by anti-immigrant sentiment, group threat theory has gained in salience. Empirical cross-national comparisons (McLaren 2003;Schneider 2007;Borgonovi 2012, Doebler 2014 and case studies from the UK (Ford 2008;Cutts, Ford, and Goodwin 2011), the Netherlands (Coenders and Scheepers 2003;Billiet and De Witte 2008;Van Assche et al 2014), Germany (Wagner, Christ, and Pettigrew 2008) and Northern Ireland (Hayes and Dowds 2006;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;McKee 2015) confirmed that lower educational achievement and lower socio-economic status are associated with an increased likelihood of perceiving immigrants and ethnic minorities as a threat. Particularly in the case of Northern Ireland, group threat theory is a plausible candidate for explaining anti-immigrant negativity, since the history of sectarian hostility was theorized by several scholars as based on economic and power struggles between the two (Protestant vs. Catholic) ethnic/religious groups (Brewer 1992;Anderson and Shuttleworth 1998;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;Brewer 2015).…”