Transformation of Labour Market in Europe and Voting for Far Right, Far Left and Populist Parties

The literature suggests that there is a significant gender gap in the support of far right parties. Male voters exhibit a higher propensity to voting for them. The probability of voting for these political parties is even higher with young and pensioner males. Far right voters are overrepresented among manual workers, routine non-manual workers, the self-employed and the unemployed. The voters usually have lower level of education and are less skilled. All these findings are based on social-survey data. Are they consistent with hard economic data, however? In order to answer this question, we analyse the set of 28 EU member states from 2000 to 2014. We extend our research to voting results of far right, far left and populist parties in parliamentary elections. We focus on diverse specifications of employment rates which are offered by the Eurostat database (by gender, age, education attainment, occupation, working time, etc.). In our model, we also include other variables of the labour market, economic activity, and variables in demographics and politics. We estimate the Tobit model with the maximum likelihood estimator because of many left censored dependent observations. During the observed period, Europe was affected by three phenomena: structural changes in the labour market, the aging of population and an economic crisis. The number of economically active men between 15 and 39 years of age diminished, many of them lost their jobs during the economic crisis and they have a lower chance of going back to work in the future because of their lower skills. They may feel frustrated and therefore turn to extreme and populist parties.