Uncertainty and Right-Wing Populism: How Uncertainty Avoidance Motivates Support for the Populist Radical Right

Observers have established a structural change of political conflict toward cultural or identity conflicts, resulting in a new cleavage dimension. In this context, recent years have witnessed the rise of populist parties, particularly the populist radical right (PRR) in Western Europe which campaigns on these issues. However, little is known about the psychological or cognitive-motivational processes underlying voters’ PRR support and its attitudinal antecedents. The new socio-cultural cleavage dimension also represents a societal split between so-called winners and losers of globalization. Those who perceive globalization (or Europeanization specifically) as threatening or disadvantageous to them make up the core of the PRR’s constituency. PRR parties demand a return to the nation-state; they portray themselves as the only ones representing the ordinary people and their interests against the forces of globalization. In this line of reasoning, support for PRR parties might be considered a psychological response to increasing societal instability and uncertainty because of globalization. Hence, our main hypothesis states that a desire for uncertainty avoidance (UA) represents an underlying psychological motive that binds together core drivers of the PRR vote—authoritarianism, nativism (i.e., exclusive nationalism, anti-immigration stances, rejection of the EU) and populism. PRR parties become attractive to voters that are motivated to avoid uncertainty because the ideological constituents of the PRR agenda represent a means to deal with uncertainty. This idea is based on theories suggesting that people’s political belief systems serve basic psychological functions, such as approach and avoidance motivation. We also discuss how the populist stance of these parties adds some ambiguity to our claim. Voting for the PRR not only entails a promise to reduce uncertainty but also challenges the political status quo which might actually increase uncertainty and deter voters who long for certainty. We based our analysis on a large-scale study conducted in the context of the Austrian parliamentary election campaign in 2017. Austria is home to a very successful and prototypical PRR party, the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ), which has been around for more than 30 years. We tested our model with structural equation modeling (SEM). Our results suggest that UA is indeed indirectly related to PRR voting since greater UA makes people more inclined to authoritarian and subsequently also right-wing socio-cultural beliefs. UA’s relation to populist attitudes is more ambiguous. Hence, associations between UA and PRR voting seem to be contingent primarily on the radical right host ideology and less so on their utilization of populist ideas. Overall, our study provides a psychological or cognitive-motivational account for explaining peoples’ motives for supporting PRR parties. By analyzing how individual differences in UA are related to actual vote choice for a PRR party and how these relations are mediated, we contribute to an increasing literature in political psychology which tries to understand (a) the psychological motives underlying political orientations more generally and (b) factors underlying populism and PRR voting in particular.