Pro-Welfare Nativist Citizens and Far Right Party Voting in Western Europe: Towards broad nativist far right voter coalitions

Recent studies have found that most far right parties (FRP) in Western Europe have increased their welfare profile during the economic crisis, but shaped by nativism in the form of welfare chauvinism. In this article, I explore to what extent this shift towards pro-welfare chauvinist positions has enabled FRP to increasingly attract voters holding a combination of anti-immigration and pro-welfare policy attitudes. Relying on the European Social Survey (ESS), the empirical results show that pro-welfare nativist citizens have increased their probability of voting for FRP over time, joining pro-market nativists as the core groups of the far right electorates. Moreover, globalization losers tend to be over-represented among those citizens holding pro-welfare nativist attitudes, so that the likelihood of these losers’ groups (especially service workers and unemployed) to support the far right has also been progressively stronger. The resulting scenario is the conformation of broad nativist far right electorates