Future Projections: Expected Status and Radical Party Support

An emergent literature has investigated the role of status stratification and relative social position in explaining support for radical (right) parties. This research has stressed that (relative) status position does matter for political preferences, even more than absolute economic hardship. Studies have so far focused on (subjective) social status (Gidron e Hall 2017; Carella e Ford 2020; Kurer 2020; Bukodi e Goldthorpe 2021) and intergenerational status discordance (Bolet 2022; Kurer e Staalduinen 2022), i.e. comparing present status with the past status of their birth family. Conversely, status expectations, i.e. ‘status discordance towards the future’, has so far been disregarded. Future projections of oneself position in society are likely to play a relevant role in shaping political preferences, beyond past trajectory. Using data from the 2019 ISSP Survey (‘Social Inequality’ module), I investigate the impact of status expectation on partisan support in 16 European countries. This survey indeed includes a unique question of status expectation ("And thinking ahead 10 years from now, where do you think you will be on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the top and 1 the bottom"). Expectations of status upgrade (‘positive discordance)’ are expected to lead towards mainstream party support (Häusermann, Kurer, e Zollinger 2023). Expectations of status decline (‘negative discordance’) are instead expected to be associated with radical partisan support. I further explore variation in the influence of expected status, by present status, class and educational, with the aim of elucidating the structural foundations of radical right vs radical left voting.