Explaining Workers' Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties in Western Europe: Evidence from Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland
By Daniel Oesch. 2008
654 citations recorded by the source corpus.
During the 1990s, the working class has become the core clientele of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. This article empirically examines the motives of workers for supporting a right-wing populist party. Based on data from the European Social Survey for Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland, three different sets of explanations are tested: (1) hypotheses stressing economic determinants, that is, the fear of wage pressure and competition over welfare benefits; (2) hypotheses emphasizing cultural determinants, that is, the perception of immigration as a threat to national identity; and (3) hypotheses focusing on social alienation, that is, dissatisfaction with the way the country's democracy works and the nonintegration into intermediary networks (trade unions). We find questions of community and identity to be clearly more important than economic grievances. Hence, in Austria and Switzerland, the electoral success of right-wing populist parties among workers seems primarily due to cultural protectionism: the defense of national identity against outsiders. In Belgium, France, and Norway, cultural protectionism is complemented by deep-seated discontent with the way the countries' democracies work.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/079f17aaa68ab9bb8c9c35d003c83afefde066db
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In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- The effect of perceived cultural and material threats on ethnic preferences in immigration attitudes (2015, background): “Analytical framework: responsiveness of immigration attitudes to group cues The well-documented centrality of group cues in political attitude formation (Sears and Funk 1991; Nelson and Kinder 1996; Mendelberg 2001) is applicable to our understanding of immigration attitudes.”
- Individual Predictors of the Radical Right-Wing Vote in Europe: A Meta-Analysis of Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals (1995–2016) (2018, background): “…is diverse, ranging from not having any immigrant friends (e.g. Rydgren 2008) to general opposition to immigration (e.g. McGann and Kitschelt 2005), to more radical views such as believing that immigrants bring down wages (e.g. Oesch 2008) or having racial prejudices (e.g. Veugelers 2005).”
- Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage (2018, background): “Recent literature finds that around 10 per cent of the variance in radical right and green voting is associated with education, occupation, rural/urban location, sex and age (Bornschier and Kriesi 2012; Dolezal 2010; Norris 2005; Oesch 2008).”