In the last decade, the far right’s increasing political clout and eroding political participation in modern societies have become subject of international concern. In order to gain insight into this phenomenon, the current work examines the interplay of situational and dispositional factors on political choices’ stability and on attitudinal political participation. A pretest-posttest control group experiment was designed, bearing real-life political and economic verisimilitude, on which 202 social sciences’ students took part. Results show conservatism lessens the detrimental effects of perceiving context as negative, uncertain and positive to the stability of political choices – where the higher the conservatism, the more stable political choices are. Moreover, it was found that shifts in attitudinal political participation were moderated by contextual perceptions and conservatism. Therein, analysis have shown that conservatives rely much more on elite-based decision-making and power control based on hierarchy, managerial expertise and knowledge – to the detriment of popular participation. In summary, conservatives resist change and are prone to accept inequality. Lastly, based on estimated model coefficients, a simulation of an American election was performed with the intent to contextualize the findings of this work and concluded that the perception of an adverse context lead to a higher likelihood to change one’s prior vote, while one’s psychological needs govern the direction in which this change occurs.
