The demand side of support for radical right parties

Abstract

This study examines the link between individual attitudes and voting for radical right parties in 16 European countries, using the European Social Survey (ESS). This study includes, in a single model, several different components of the radical right political platform in order to test which components are more strongly found among radical right voters. Using the initial assumption that the anti-immigrant message of radical right parties should be attractive to individuals with similar predispositions, I use the ESS to find evidence that radical right voters are attracted to these parties because of the political message of immigration attitudes and anti-democratic attitudes. Further, depending on the context, social conservatism is associated with radical right support. In sum, radical right support is based on multiple factors with immigration attitudes as the primary consideration, with populism and social conservatism playing a minor but significant role.

The Role of Implicit Attitudes in Populist Radical‐Right Support

“…In this study, we looked at the role of implicit attitudes in affecting populist radical‐right party support beyond traditional explanations, such as ideological closeness, anti‐immigrant attitudes, and political cynicism (e.g., Kehrberg, ; Mudde, ; Schumacher & Rooduijn, ; Zhirkov, ). In doing so, we followed the call of political psychologists to assess the role of implicit attitudes in affecting political attitudes in general and voting behavior in particular (Glaser & Finn, ; Ksiazkiewicz & Hedrick, ).…”

“…The first finds that a vote for the populist radical right is based on support for the ideological standpoints of the party (Van der Brug, Fennema, & Tillie, ). In that case, voters can be distinguished from others by their ideological positioning on the far right of the ideological spectrum and by their strong national identity or their opposition to immigration (e.g., recent studies by Kehrberg, ; Lucassen & Lubbers, ; Zhirkov, ). We include ideology, measured on a 10‐point scale, where “1” represents extreme left, and “10” extreme right ( M = 5.24, SD = 1.93).…”

“…The second line of argument is that votes are also based on a protest against the establishment. Indeed, various scholars find support for the assumption that more cynical voters, who distrust politics, support these parties (e.g., Kehrberg, ; Schumacher & Rooduijn, ; Zhirkov ). We measured this in two scales: Populist Attitude and Political Cynicism.…”

“…In recent years, scholarly work on European populist radical‐right (PRR) voting has centered around the idea that preference for this type of party can be accounted for using a few critical explanations such as ideological closeness, anti‐immigrant attitudes, and political cynicism (e.g., Kehrberg, ; Mudde, ; Schumacher & Rooduijn, ; Zhirkov, ). However, work in political psychology shows that implicit attitudes towards parties and candidates in general predict political judgment and behavior in ways beyond that accounted for by self‐reported measures (Friese, Bluemke, & Wänke, ; Gawronski, Galdi, & Arcuri, ; Maier et al, ; Nosek, Graham, & Hawkins, ; Rocatto & Zogmeister, ), especially in contested or socially sensitive domains.…”

Emotions and Populist Support

“…Populist parties have successfully established themselves in most Western and Central European countries (Rydgren, 2005(Rydgren, , 2007Taggart, 2017), which has led not only to an ongoing debate about the precise nature of populism, but also raised the question how this seemingly sudden emergence can be explained. However, particularly on the demand side, most of the existing work has focused on structural or attitudinal factors (Kehrberg, 2015;Niedermayer and Hofrichter, 2016;Lengfeld, 2017;Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018), whose relative stability make it difficult to explain their sudden political "activation" (Bonikowski, 2017;Hawkins, Kaltwasser and Andreadis, 2018;Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018).…”