The Paradox of Well-being: Do Unfavorable Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Contexts Deepen or Dampen Radical Left and Right Voting Among the Less Well-Off?
By Matthijs Rooduijn, Brian Burgoon. 2018
145 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 contextual factors. Our study suggests that less well-off citizens vote for radical parties mainly under favorable aggregate-level circumstances. We distinguish two possible mechanisms underlying this effect—relative deprivation and risk aversion—and find support for relative deprivation only among radical right voters and for risk aversion for both types of radical voters, yet with predictable differences between the radical left and right supporter bases. Economic hardship leads to radical right voting when the socioeconomic circumstances are favorable and to radical left voting when net migration is modest. Our findings suggest a genuine paradox of radicalism: individual economic suffering might foster left and right radicalism, but mainly when that suffering takes place amid favorable conditions at the aggregate level.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6c009b4fe79b10fcb5b4b8365541cb110695d48c
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In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Positional deprivation and support for radical right and radical left parties* (2018, methodology): “The categorization of radical left and radical right parties is based on widely-used coding, including that by March and Mudde (2005), Mudde (2007), March (2011), and Rooduijn and Burgoon (2018).”
- The threat of social decline: income inequality and radical right support (2020, background): “However, we know from existing research that radical right voters are distinct not only in terms of their underlying socio-economic profiles (Rooduijn et al. 2017; Rooduijn and Burgoon 2017), but also in how they perceive their social status (Lipset”