Ideological profiles of potential PRR voters: the role of populism, nativism, and the position of sexual and gender identity minorities.

This paper presents a two-step approach in which it sets out to further develop (1) our understanding of the role of attitudes towards sexuality and gender identity among the PRR electorate, and (2) a first understanding of how this may help explain the voting for PRR parties, also and particularly of non-heterosexual voters and women. Overall, we address four core caveats in Populist Radical Right voter studies focusing on attitudes towards gender and sexual minorities: omission of potential voters; representing gender and sexuality as an undifferentiated category; issue-specific rather than comparative analysis, and the lack of attention for the voting behavior of sexual minorities which are put central in recent PRR discourses. To address these lacunae, we use a theory-grounded latent class analysis (LCA), on the Dutch Parliamentary Election Study (DPES 2021), to identify profiles in terms of how nativism, populism, and gender identity & sexuality attitudes are combined differently among citizens who are likely to vote PRR. Subsequently, we explore how these classes differ on, amongst others, party preferences, gender, sexuality, and nativism. The selection of included items is grounded in a conceptual-theoretical discussion on the building blocks of PRR ideology, including populism and nativism, and the role gender and sexuality play therein. This discussion provides a lens with which we analyze the empirical findings. We find distinct profiles in terms of populist attitudes, nativism and gender identity and sexuality attitudes: a small minority of gender-and-sexuality-conservatives and larger classes of more moderate and moderate potential PRR voters; all being clearly nativist. One class (23%) in particular is more progressive regarding the position of sexual and gender-identity minorities than the general population average, while a second (29%) is more or less on par with it; the other three are more conservative on these issues. To further understand the PRR voter classes identified by the LCA, we linked the class assignments to the original DPES 2021 dataset and estimated relations with other items from the survey that were not part of the LCA analysis, including aforementioned party choices and demographic, such as sexuality. This explorative analysis further validates the differences found, showing that gender-identity and sexuality attitudes help understand the different choice sets parties competing with the PRR, particularly whether these are orthodox Christians or Conservative-liberals. Leftwing populist parties hardly turned out to be competitors in the Dutch context. Zooming in on sexual minorities in particular, most non-heterosexual respondents who do consider voting for PRR parties—a small minority in our data—are in the most gender-modern or in gender-moderate classes. The contrast is especially stark with the gender-conservative class, which coincides with the gender-modern class.