Mainstreaming authoritarian nostalgia: How radical right normalization affects expression of nostalgia

The ways in which the past is constructed in collective memory can underscore modern political ideals and provide ideological foundations for party and voter behavior. When this history is explicitly authoritarian, a nostalgic embrace of the past could embolden exclusive or anti-democratic attitudes. When and why do individuals embrace nostalgic positions towards former authoritarians? Emergent literature on authoritarian nostalgia often treats it as causally prior to the breakthrough of radical right parties. This project flips the causal arrow, asking instead how the success of radical right parties affects levels of nostalgia in the public. It argues that radical right parties (and other nostalgic parties) tend to first find success when public attention is drawn away from their ties to former authoritarians. However, once the party is sufficiently normalized (for reasons other than their association to the past), individuals update their attitudes and willingness to be openly nostalgic. The project employs a cross-national analysis and original survey experiments in Spain and Portugal from November 2024. Analysis of pilot data suggests that the normalization of the radical right increases expression of authoritarian nostalgia, and that this result is partially driven by changing understandings of ‘what it means to be nostalgic’ once radical right parties join the political mainstream. These findings contribute to our understanding of how attitudes towards history, social norms, and radical right parties interact, offering practical implications for how to curb growing nostalgia. More broadly, it offers a new theoretical account of how stigmatized political ideas can enter the mainstream.