Highlighted Publication: Dissecting Electoral Support for the Far Right

Published on 27 October 2020

In the new rubric, Highlighted Publication, we share an article published by of our International Studies colleagues.

In the first edition of this new rubric, you will find a summary of the article “Dissecting Electoral Support for the Far Right: A Comparison between Mature and Post-Communist European Democracies”, publicized in Government and Opposition (2020). This article was written by our International Studies colleague Teodora Gaidytė, together with Tobias Brils, Jasper Muis. Below Teodora explains what their article was about.

Teodora Gaidytė

Far right and non voters

In this article my co-authors and me investigated citizens’ support for far-right parties by assessing three explanatory approaches – ‘cultural backlash’, ‘socioeconomic deprivation’ and ‘protest vote’. Whereas previous research on the far right predominantly focused on explaining electoral support in Western Europe, we examine to what extent these explanations hold in both new and old democracies in Europe. The article’s second main contribution is that it compared the far-right constituency with three other groups of citizens, including non-voters, rather than simply contrasting them with voters for all other parties.

Anti immigration attitudes

Analysing attitudes and voting behaviour in 17 countries covered in the European Social Survey (ESS) in 2014 and 2016, we find that anti-immigration attitudes are most important in distinguishing far-right voters from all other groups in both mature and post-communist democracies. Nativist explanations clearly triumph. This confirms earlier studies showing that anti-immigration attitudes are one of the strongest factors for explaining electoral far-right support in Western Europe.

At the same time, our article adds to the existing literature by revealing important differences between post-communist and mature democracies when it comes to who chooses for the far right. Considering the ‘cultural backlash’ perspective, our findings show that in post-communist democracies, hostility towards immigration accounts to a lesser degree for electoral support for the far right. Its effects on far-right voting are considerably smaller.

The figure shows country-by-country analysis of the effect of anti-immigrant attitudes to vote for different party families or abstain. Far-right voters are the reference category. Reading example: in Sweden, the respondents who score higher on anti-immigrant scale are less likely to vote for center-right and left-wing parties or abstain, compared to the far-right voters. Contrary, in Lithuania, people who are more anti-immigrant are not less likely to vote for other parties.

‘Losers of globalization’

Furthermore, far-right voters are not the so-called socioeconomic ‘losers of globalization’. Regarding unemployment and perceived income, we conclude that the electorate of the far right does not differ from people who vote for traditional left-wing parties, in mature or post-communist democracies. Moreover, when compared with non-voters, far-right voters are more educated and have significantly higher perceived incomes (in both Western Europe and CEE).

A possible avenue for future research is to achieve more in-depth understanding of the diverse groups of far-right voters. Especially when considering post-communist democracies the lack of uniformity in far-right party selection is problematic. Categorization is time- and context-dependent because some mainstream parties radicalized. Prominent examples are Fidesz in Hungary and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, which initially gained electoral successes as conservative parties and then radicalized their rhetoric and policies, causing the move towards illiberal democracy in their countries.

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