Has Secularization Changed the New Right? Moral Traditionalism, Religion, and the New Right in Western Europe (1981-2017)

Parties of the populist New Right and their supporters have long been considered as not only ethno-nationalist, but also as morally traditionalist, i.e., favoring traditional gender roles and opposing same-sex marriage and abortion. Recent studies, however, have shown that some of these parties now boast surprisingly progressive profiles, as well as some of their supporters. While it is implied that the New Right is changing, the existing literature does not yet propose a sound theory of when and why the New Right is more morally progressive and when it is more morally traditionalist. In this project, I propose and test a theory of how processes of secularization and the concomitant decline in moral traditionalism in Western Europe change the New Right – both the parties and their electoral support. Applying multilevel regression analysis to the data from the Manifesto Project and the European Values Study (1981-2017) for Western-European countries, I examine whether secularization makes parties of the New Right and their supporters more morally progressive, and thus transforms the link between moral traditionalism, religion, and electoral support for the New Right.