‘Winning formulas’: the electoral success of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe

This contribution investigates the growing success of Populist Radical Right-wing Parties (PRRP) in Western Europe. Based on cross-sectional analysis, it looks into the socio-economic causes of their support. Structuralist approaches generally explain the electoral successes of PPRP by the mobilization of ‘losers of globalization’. These citizens, mainly low-skilled and blue-collar workers, tend to display preferences in favour of welfare state redistribution and economic protectionism. Their support for PRRP thus contradicts Kitschelt’s ‘winning formula’, which explains the success of these parties through a combination of socio-economic ‘neoliberal’ and socio-cultural ‘authoritarian’ appeals. The importance of this socio-cultural dimension is still very significant. Interestingly, however, populist Radical Right Parties are said to take increasingly different stances on economic questions in order to account for the shifting preferences of their electoral clienteles, thereby pleading for ‘chauvinist’ forms of welfare-state redistribution. At the same time, other social groups, such as small business owners and independents, are also overrepresented within PRRP constituencies. These groups are not (forcibly) ‘losers of globalization’ and show socio-economic preferences that distinguish them from the latter. From this class-based perspective, the present paper focuses on the socio-economic preferences of PRRP supporters. Using European Social Survey data in eight West European countries, it shows that PRRP constituencies are electoral coalitions consisting of sub-groups of voters with diverging socio-economic attitudes: besides attracting citizens with ‘interventionist-nationalist’ preferences – congruent with the losers of globalization thesis –, these parties also mobilize voters whose preferences are in line with the economic right-wing appeals observed by Kitschelt. The paper thus indicates that the success of PRRP should be explained not by one, but by the coexistence of two winning formulas, appealing to socially different groups with different policy preferences.