Conformity Against Extremism: Authoritarians’ Aversion to the Far-Right

Current research into why people vote for far-right parties frequently focuses on the importance of immigration and related psychological considerations such as cultural and economic threat. While some of this research considers individual-level moderating effects from voter characteristics, there is little consideration of the role of people’s values in these explanations. Values are fundamental to determining people’s motivations and stand out as a clear individual-level, psychological characteristic that should moderate people’s beliefs on their voting behavior. In this paper, we propose that the authoritarian predisposition, a values orientation concerned with the trade-off between individual autonomy and social conformity, acts to moderate people’s beliefs about immigration on whether they vote for a far-right party. Using rounds 1-10 of the European Social Survey cumulative dataset, our logistic regression models confirm that the positive effect of negative immigration beliefs on voting for far-right parties decreases as peoples’ authoritarian predisposition strengthen. We conclude that people’s willingness to vote for the far-right is not just a matter of agreeing with their anti-immigration policy positions but is also affected by their willingness to vote for a non-mainstream party, something those with a stronger authoritarian predisposition, and a stronger attachment to social norms, are less willing to do.