Social Stigma and Radical Right Voting: The Effects of Local Disapproval on Support for the Sweden Democrats

Why do some voters translate ideological agreement with the Radial Right’s core ideology – which is quite widespread in many European countries – in a vote for these parties, while others don’t? We hypothesize this is conditioned by the negative social cues many voters receive regarding these parties. While perceived legitimacy has been established as a precondition for Radical Right electoral breakthrough, little is known regarding individual-level determinants predicting which citizens refrain from voting for controversial parties. We investigate this question using unique Swedish voting advice data, which contains 2 million advices based on participants’ views on 30 policy issues, as well as their subsequent self-reported party choice. This allows us to investigate whether participants choose to discard the advice more often for the controversial Sweden Democrats. We expect this to be especially so when social stigma is most pronounced: in areas where general support for SD is low.