Two Sides of the Same Coin? Investigating Issue Dimensionalities Behind Radical-Right and Radical-Left Support

The research question we want to address in this paper is whether radical-right and radical-left voters differ in their issue preferences and, if so, on which dimensions the differences are more relevant. In a nutshell, our aim is test whether (and to what extent) these two electorate overlaps. The literature on the radical-right parties (RRPs) points out that the electorate of these parties is focused both on cultural issues, such as immigration, and xxx. For Radical Left Parties (RLPs) too, albeit from an opposite perspective, cultural issues proved to be important voting drivers. In the last decades RRPs consistently aligned with RLPs, favouring “classic” redistributive issues over pro-market attitudes. Indeed, the literature shows that both RRPs and RLPs’ voters are much more concerned with redistributive policies, rather than pro-market reforms. However, while positioning on the economic-left, RRPs strongly prefer the so-called national priority (welfare chauvinism). Recent electoral developments, such as in Germany with AfD gaining at the expenses of Die Linke and in France where Le Pen was voted in the runoff by many who chose Melenchon in the first presidential round, seem to indicate that the two electorates are not too dissimilar, and more prone to move from one opposite pole to the other than to opt for the allegedly ideologically closer mainstream party. Employing the six-country comparative ICCP dataset, collected between 2017 and 2018 across major Western European countries, our paper compares and contrasts issue preferences on the cultural and economic dimensions for voters of RLPs and RRPs, thus assessing their similarities and differences.