The Political Economy of Radical Right Populism: Fear, Anger, and the Income Gap in the 21st Century

While the extant literature has helped us better understand the growing popularity of radical right populist parties and candidates in many advanced market capitalist countries in recent decades, significant gaps remain. To this end, this paper will examine the sources of individual and subnational variation in electoral support for the radical right by developing a series of multilevel models exploring the connection between votes for the radical right and a range of individual-level and contextual variables that are hypothesized to promote support for these parties and candidates. Variables of particular interest include income inequality, poverty, fiscal redistribution/poverty reduction, unemployment rates, immigration flows, government performance, levels of corruption, and trust in public servants. Individual-level data come from Wave 5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems and contextual variables are from various sources, including both national and subnational measures of income inequality and poverty from the LIS Datacenter as well as data on trust and government performance from the 2016 International Social Survey Program’s (ISSP) Module on the “Role of Government V.” We examine a total of 20 elections for the following countries and election years: Australia (2019), Austria (2017), Belgium (2019), Brazil (2018), Canada (2019), Chile (2017), Finland (2019), France (2017), Germany (2017), Great Britain (2017), Greece (2015), Hungary (2018), Iceland (2016), Ireland (2016), Italy (2018), Lithuania (2016), Norway (2017), Sweden (2018), Switzerland (2019), and the United States (2016). Though data are not available for every variable of interest, this paper will be the first step in a larger project. Previous research in this area has found that levels of income inequality play a major role in mediating the relationships between immigration, unemployment, and support for radical right parties.