"Man-y" ways to be right: Generational and Life-Cycle Differences in Male Far-Right Voting

In most advanced democracies, far-right parties have been increasingly electorally successful and have managed to score record election results. In that regard, recent exit polls from various countries have shown that the far-right scores exceptionally strong electoral results among men, and increasingly so among young men. Since their early days, far-right parties are not only institutionally dominated by men (Weeks et al. 2023) and largely represented by men in parliaments and governments (Erzeel and Rashkova 2017), but also - as research has repeatedly shown - more strongly voted for by male voters (Arzheimer 2016; Harteveld et al. 2015; Ralph-Morrow 2022; Spierings and Zaslove 2017). While most studies on the gender gap in far-right voting look at differences between men and women, they less frequently focus on differences within genders, and particularly rarely on differences between different groups of men. In that regard, relatively little is known about new generations of male far-right voters’ divergence from earlier generations of voters who had voted for the far-right. This stands in contrast to the fact that far-right parties have strongly transformed over the past two decades, entering a "fourth wave" of far-right politics (Mudde 2020, Weisskircher 2023). Thus, because far-right parties have differently tried to appeal to their core constituency of male voters, it is likely that different groups of male voters vote for these parties because of deviating formative experiences. In this paper, I argue that different age groups and generations of men vote for the far-right for diverging reasons. First, relying on the literature on "modern sexism" (Anduiza and Rico 2024; Off et al. 2022), I assume that young men are more likely to vote for the far-right because of gender-related attitudes. I also expect that newer generations assess related debates to be more salient. Second, I assume that newer generations of male voters are less likely to vote for the far-right because of redistributive attitudes. Third and in line with research on occupational mobility (Kurer 2020), I assume that life-cycle effects are of relevance too, with male voters being more likely to vote far-right when these voters stagnate in their educational and occupational paths. To test these assumptions, I rely on data from the European Social Survey (2002 to 2023) and original survey data from Germany and Switzerland conducted in 2024. While the cross-sectional time-spanning data helps me to disentangle Age, Period, and Cohort effects, the latter data helps me more closely analyze differences in party perceptions and individual-level salience. These findings have broad implications for our understanding of the seemingly increasing gender gap in Western democracies and help us contextualize the temporal dimension of these shifts.