Far Right Party-Voter Issue Agreement beyond Immigration

• In Event: You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Far-Right Round

Abstract

Far right parties continue to dominate academic discourse and public debate
about the future of democracy in Western Europe and beyond. These right parties have
largely mobilized grievances related to immigration and European integration. However,
far right parties are better characterized as reflections of post-industrial politics rather
than single issue parties. Beyond immigration and Euroskepticism, perceptions of
declining status and a general dissatisfaction with ‘politics as usual’ have been identified
as relevant predictors of far right party support. Similarly, a relatively sturdy constellation
of sociodemographic correlates—including age, class, and education—are associated
with far right voting. However, as these parties have coalesced with or lent confidence
and supply to mainstream right parties, they have ultimately had to articulate a variety of
issue positions beyond immigration—or otherwise organize seemingly unrelated issues
through an anti-immigrant lens. Hence, this project asks to what extent far right parties
and their voters are aligned on issues other immigration and Euroskepticism, or if the
electorates of Western Europe’s radical right are attitudinally heterogeneous beyond of
these flagship issues.
This project is interested in the degree far right voters are attitudinally congruent
with far right parties and the extent to which that congruence predicts far right support. I
consider whether far right parties provide far right voters with a vehicle for
representation on issues beyond those for which far right parties are known. Little work
has examined how cross-national differences among far right parties and far right voter
attitudes move together. Using variation in far right party platforms from the UNC
Chapel Hill Expert Survey and voter data from the European Social Survey, this project
suggests that party-voter congruence on issues other than immigration predicts
individual support for far right parties, related to wealth redistribution, moral issues like
LGBTQ tolerance, as well as immigration and EU integration. As such, this project
suggests an increasing distance between attitudinally unified far right parties and voters
from the mainstream parties in Western Europe, demonstrating an increasingly
developed cleavage in West European party competition.

Author

• Trevor J. Allen, Central Connecticut State University