“The Effect of Income Inequality on Far-Right Support in 33 European Countries: A Panel Data Fixed Effects Analysis (1980-2020)

The academic literature on the explanations of the rise of far-right parties in Europe has been characterized by a debate between scholars who highlight cultural anxieties and those who emphasize economic grievances. However, there is also a debate on the economic side between the idea that the support for the far-right is a result of the degrading situation of the poorer classes, and the idea that the upper-middle classes are also affected by precarity and are losing out relative to the elites in society. This research contributes to the academic literature on the far-right by investigating the empirical relationship between (a) income inequality and the percentage of vote shares for (b) far-right parties across a forty-year timeframe. Adopting an aggregate level approach, the paper examines different income groups across 33 European countries in the period between 1980-2020 via an original large N database that features multiple imputation methods. The panel data fixed-effects statistical models indicate that only the income share (i.e., distribution) of the bottom 40% is statistically significant and correlated to higher levels of support for the far-right. Therefore, the empirical findings in the paper indicate that the worsening economic condition of the working classes is related to the increasing vote share of the far-right.