Populist, authoritarian, securitarian or ideological voters? Explaining the electoral support for radical left and right parties in France and Spain

A growing literature focuses on the nature, correlates and effects of populist attitudes, including their impact on the vote. While many works have found that populist attitudes increase the probability of voting for populist parties and candidates, recent research has downplayed the role of these orientations in explaining the vote for some radical parties usually defined as populist. Given the relative novelty of these results, this area still requires analytical attention to strengthen the evidence and the validity of these recent findings. Do populist attitudes have an influence on the support for non-mainstream parties? If so, in which ways? Do other types of orientations rather than populist attitudes contribute to better explaining the vote for non-mainstream parties? Drawing on previous research on the correlates of support for Bolsonaro (Castanho Silva et al. 2022), Trump (Hibbing 2020), and some Argentinian parties (Sendra and Llamazares 2023), this paper uses data from two original surveys conducted in France and Spain to analyse of the roles of social identity, populist attitudes and ideology in explaining support for the radical left and right.