Knowledge, Realignment, and Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties

• In Event: Democracy and Populism

Abstract

The past twenty years have seen significant upheaval in the party systems of Western democracies with growing party fragmentation and the rise of anti-establishment right-wing nationalist parties. These shifts reflect a political realignment caused by the shift from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy (Kitschelt and Rehm 2023; Piketty 2020). From this perspective, the political landscape is now defined as a two-dimensional space in which the traditional class-based conflicts defined by income redistribution are crosscut by a new, more salient dimension defined by levels of education. This second libertarian-authoritarian dimension captures a wide range of non-economic issues including gender roles, migration, cultural diversity, and law & order issues.
Across Europe, right-wing populists have been well placed to take advantage of this realignment process as their strong authoritarian stances on immigration, cultural diversity, and anti-globalization cannot easily be copied by mainstream parties who have long standing commitments to the European Union and the liberal social and economic values at its core. At the same time, this realignment is occurring in a period of rising inequality and economic insecurity, particularly among working class voters. Conflicts surrounding the traditional left-right economic dimension pose a serious challenge for right-wing populist parties. Historically, these parties relied on a “winning formula” in which anti-immigrant appeals were combined with a neo-liberal economic agenda that fit into a broader ideological attack on the bureaucratic state, elites, labor unions, and mainstream political parties (Kitschelt and McGann 1997). The attempt to overcome their niche status forced these parties to put together a cross-class coalition with a growing base of working-class voters whose economic preferences run counter to the party’s own positions and that of its most likely coalition partners. Thus, as right wing populist parties have grown they have themselves become cross-cut by the traditional left-right cleavage that defined post-war party systems.
How do right-wing populist parties manage the tensions caused by significant disagreements over the redistributive dimension among their voters? This paper argues that these parties have successfully managed this conflict through a combination of two factors. First, right-wing nationalist parties adopt intentionally ambiguous positions on economic issues that make it difficult for voters to identify the tension between their preferences and that of the party, allowing those with very different preferences for redistribution to continue to support the party. Second, for this strategy to be effective, these parties rely more heavily than other parties on a pool of voters with very limited levels of traditional political knowledge. Strategic ambiguity is most effective on those with limited knowledge about party-positions, system functioning, and the identity of major political actors. Thus, low knowledge voters are much more susceptible to the efforts of right-wing populist parties to obfuscate their economic positions.
This paper investigates these claims through an evaluation of election study data in Germany and Denmark. The evidence from these countries reveals several important findings. First, voters for right-wing populist parties have significantly lower levels of traditional political knowledge when compared to the voters of all other parties. In fact, low political knowledge is one of the most consistent and powerful predictors of support for these parties. Second, these parties maintain an extraordinarily high degree of ambiguity in the electorate concerning their positions on economic issues with large portions of the electorate and their voters placing them on both the right and left of the redistribution spectrum. Third, the survey data suggests that this combination of positional ambiguity and limited political knowledge are core parts of the electoral success of right-wing nationalist parties.

Author

• Jason Jordan, Drew University