We explore how support for radical parties of both the left and right may be shaped by what we call “positional deprivation,” where growth in income of individuals at a given point in the income distribution is outpaced by income growth elsewhere in that distribution. We argue that positional deprivation captures the combination of over-time and relative misfortune that can be expected to distinctly spur support for radical left and right parties. We explore this possibility by matching new measures of positional deprivation to individual-level survey data on party preferences in 20 European countries from 2002 to 2014. We find that positional deprivation is robustly correlated with supporting radical populist parties. First, positional deprivation generally, measured as average income growth across deciles of a country’s income distribution minus a respondent’s own decile’s growth, is associated with respondents’ retreat from mainstream parties and with support for both radical right and, particularly, radical left parties. Second, positional deprivation relative to the highest and the lowest ends of the income spectrum play out differently for radical-right and for radical-left support. A respondent’s positional deprivation relative to the wealthiest decile’s growth in his or her country tends to spur support for radical left but not radical right parties. In contrast, positional deprivation relative to the poorest decile’s growth in a respondent’s country tends to spur support for radical right but not left parties. The results suggest that the combination of over-time and relative economic misfortune may be key to how economic experience shapes radical backlash of the left and right.
Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges-from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies. In Anti-System Politics, Jonathan Hopkin traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result ...
#1Daniel Oesch(UNIL: University of Lausanne)H-Index: 17
#2Line Rennwald(EUI: European University Institute)H-Index: 7
The rise of the radical right fundamentally changes the face of electoral competition in Western Europe.Bipolar competition is becoming tripolar, as the two dominant party poles of the twentieth century – the left and the centre-right – are challenged by a third pole of the radical right. Between 2000 and 2015, the radical right has secured more than 12 per cent of the vote in over tenWestern European countries. This article shows how electoral competition between the three party poles plays out...
#2Brian Burgoon(UvA: University of Amsterdam)H-Index: 20
Radical left and right parties are increasingly successful—particularly among the less well-off. We assess the extent to which this negative effect of well-being on radical voting is moderated by c...
We investigate the impact of globalization on electoral outcomes in 15 Western European countries over 1988–2007. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual‐level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Comparative Manifesto Project. We compute a region‐specific measure of exposure to Chinese imports, based on the historical industry specialization of each region. To identify the causal impact of the import shock, we instrument imports to Euro...
#2Willem de Koster(EUR: Erasmus University Rotterdam)H-Index: 13
Leftist and rightist populist parties in Western Europe both oppose trade openness. Is support for economic protectionism also relevant for their electorates? We assess this in the Netherlands, where both types of populist parties have seats in parliament. Analyses of representative survey data (n = 1,296) demonstrate that support for protectionism drives voting for such parties, as do the well-established determinants of political distrust (both populist constituencies), economic egalitarianism...
Support for radical parties on both the left and right is on the rise, fueling intuition that both radicalisms have similar underpinnings. Indeed, existing studies show that radical left and right voters have overlapping positions and preferences. In this article, however, we focus on the differences in the voting bases of such parties. We show that radical left and right voters have sharply diverging ideological profiles. When it comes to the historical traditions of the ‘left’ and ‘right’, the...
How is populism distributed over the political spectrum? Are right-wing parties more populist than left-wing parties? Based on the analysis of 32 parties in five Western European countries between 1989 and 2008, we show that radical parties on both the left and the right are inclined to employ a populist discourse. This is a striking finding, because populism in Western Europe has typically been associated with the radical right; only some particular radical left parties have been labeled populi...
Using a multilevel analysis method, this article tests different hypotheses for how income inequality affects voter support for radical right-wing parties (RRPs) in Western Europe. Specifically, the article shows how this ‘income inequality effect’ encourages poor people to vote for RRPs, while it concurrently discourages rich people from doing so. This finding supports the social identity hypothesis, which states that social identity (a micro-level factor) intermediates income inequality effect...
This article investigates the impact of niche party success on the policy agendas of mainstream parties. Following from the expected electoral effects of issue politicization, the success of radical right and green parties will cause different reactions from mainstream parties. While mainstream parties emphasize anti-immigrant positions in response to radical right success, green party success will have the opposite effect for environmental issues. Since green parties constitute issue owners, th...
This review article and special issue introduction argues that studying the relationship between the populist radical right and the welfare state requires bridging literatures that have so far adva...
This article investigates how unemployment risk within households affects voting for the radical right. The authors contribute to recent advances in the literature that have highlighted the role of economic threat for understanding the support of radical-right parties. In contrast to existing work, the authors do not treat voters as atomistic individuals; they instead investigate households as a crucial site of preference formation. Combining largescale labor market data with comparative survey ...
In recent decades, and especially since the economic crisis, young people have been finding it more difficult to maintain or exceed the living standards of their parents. As a result, they increasingly expect socioeconomic downward mobility. We study the influence of such a pessimistic view on political attitudes, assuming that it is not so much young adults’ current economic status, but rather their anxiety concerning a prospective socioeconomic decline that affects their ideological positions....
#2Oliver Keenan(Goldsmiths, University of London)H-Index: 1
Research on national collective narcissism, the belief and resentment that a nation's exceptionality is not sufficiently recognized by others, provides a theoretical framework for understanding the psychological motivations behind the support for right-wing populism. It bridges the findings regarding the economic and sociocultural conditions implicated in the rise of right-wing populism and the findings regarding leadership processes necessary for it to find its political expression. The conditi...
The last decades have seen the emergence of a divide pitting the new left against the far right in advanced democracies. We study how this universalism-particularism divide is crystallizing into a ...
What are the political consequences of economic globalization? Since the 1990s, scholars of European party politics have noted the rise of extremist parties, especially right-wing populist ones, an...
AbstractIn striking contrast to the notion that democracy is under threat because ‘the middle’ has been ‘squeezed’ over recent decades, Iversen and Soskice (2019) in their book, Democracy and Prosp...
ABSTRACTIncome inequality and radical right parties have both been on the rise in Western democracies, yet few studies explore the linkages between the two – despite prominent arguments about voter...
#2Andrej Zaslove(Radboud University Nijmegen)H-Index: 18
Populism has become a pervasive concept in political science research. However, a central and basic question remains unanswered: which European parties are more populist than others? Despite the in...