Voting for the Populist Radicals on the Right and the Left

Abstract

Over the past decades various European countries have seen the rise of radical right populist parties. Previous research on the supporters of these parties has shown that several groups of citizens tend to be underrepresented amongst their voters. Typically, specific attitudes and policy preferences also combine populist radical right- and left-wing electorates. The former are usually identified by their shared rejection of immigration, whereas the latter are usually identified by a shared rejection of current economic liberalism and capitalism. In addition, recent scholarship has proposed that, in addition to these kinds of attitudes, populism can serve as a harmonising attitude between them and can help explain the support for populist parties. However, this latter projection has not yet been fully explored and most of the scholarship’s focus lies on more traditional identifiers and characteristics of the populist radical right and the populist radical left. This panel brings together five papers that focus on different individual-level predictors of the support for both the radical right and the radical left, and that further explore the causal mechanisms that might underlie their support